Who We Are and What We’re Excited About
Here in Web Services we work with the community to support their digital needs. Whether it be working with clients to launch a new website, providing support to manage a current departmental site, or provide the means to take in online payments, we are the people to go to.
And who are we? Well, we’re a team of eight developers, designers, support specialists, writers, musicians, yogis, opera singers, photoshoppers, gamers, and friends. Five of us work on designing and coding, and three of us work with the community.
We became an official department within ITS in 2010 and a lot has happened since.
We’ve presented at WordCamp San Francisco and were interviewed for WordPress TV for being one of the first universities to use WordPress as full blown CMS. We’ve delivered an e-commerce service that has seen over $5 million in transactions. We’ve hosted 12 Coffee Break events and facilitated more than 30 workshops. We’ve trained hundreds of Carleton employees and helped the Department of University Communications increase hits to their website by more than 200%. And we now support over 600 Carleton University websites.
We’ve got some pretty exciting things in the works for this year. I asked each of the members of our team what they were most excited about this year, and here’s what they said:
Mike: I’m excited to learn the latest web technologies and rebuild our sites using the latest and greatest and I’m excited for all new projects that will push the limits of our understanding and capabilities.
Ryan: The opportunities I am most excited to explore in 2019 are the ways the web services can improve our development workflow, and our service excellence. By incorporating cutting edge javascript technologies into our stack, expanding our DevOps pipeline, and doubling down on our user experience focus we will position Carleton’s web presence to be in the top echelon of Canadian Universities.
Mike I: I’m excited for moving our technology stack into an even more modern practice.
Charlotte: My favourite thing about working in Web Services is the people. I get to spend each day with a group of funny (and somewhat nutty) peeps who are passionate about IT, all things web, and food! In my job I also get to meet many awesome people around campus, train them and help them with their web sites. This year I look forward to showing off and helping you implement all the cool new web features our team comes up with!
Danny: I’m excited about a top secret project that will be announced later this year. It’s a collaborative project that the whole team has been involved with – it will change the way we create websites and manage our digital properties at Carleton.
Andrew: I am excited about our next Coffee Break with Web Services. We always enjoy the energy our clients bring to the room, and the opportunity it gives us to talk about what exciting new developments they can expect to see in the Carleton template and other services we provide. We have been staging our Coffee Breaks for 7 years now and with them we have established a great way to connect with the people for whom we provide services. And the questions that arise at these sessions have led to the development of some of the most popular features in the CCMS template. Also, me and MK are pretty entertaining!
Troy: 2019 is the year of change, both personally and professionally. In a work environment where change is fast and frequent, keeping up-to-date with things is both exciting and difficult. Late last year, our main publishing tool, WordPress, underwent a significant change, and the ripple effect will be seen throughout 2019. These changes, and how we can use them to our advantage to continue improving who our clients work with their sites, has gotten me more excited and motivated as a developer than I’ve been in a number of years.
And as for me (Mary Kathryn) …well, I’m excited to facilitate more workshops. I love to talk about SEO, Google Analytics and writing for the web and plan to host one workshop a month. I’m also excited to re-launch our newsletter because we have so much going on that I want to share with all of you.
If you have a project that you think we could help you with, let us know! Contact the ITS Service Desk with as much info as you can provide and we’ll see what we can do for you.
Looking forward to working with you in 2019!
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