School of the Art Institute of Chicago

www.saic.edu

“Palantir easily rose to the challenge. Their staff is highly knowledgeable, professional, and personable — all important qualities when approaching a large-scale Web site redesign and content management system (CMS) integration project.”
— Rae Ulrich, Director of Electronic Communications, School of the Art Institute

While revamping the Art Institute of Chicago’s Museum Web site, Palantir also recreated the Web site of the School of the Art Institute, a project that offered entirely different challenges. In line with its focus on creativity and innovation, the School wanted a site that pushed the envelope in terms of what a browser could display. But with tens of thousands of pages of content, the information on the site was nearly impossible to find, let alone manage.

The design direction chosen by the School involved gathering content that had previously appeared on multiple pages onto a single page that displays different amounts of information depending on the choices made by the user. Palantir, working again with design partner Studio Blue, built the site using nested content layers that open or close as the user clicks on the header or subheader. This nontraditional design approach forced an evaluation of all content into a larger informational hierarchy, making previously hidden information more accessible. Implementation costs were kept low with Serena Collage, which imports existing content instead of requiring all-new material.

Custom code interfaces with the School’s database of student and faculty artwork, which is dynamically displayed throughout the site, and pulls course information directly out of the School’s PeopleSoft course database. Given the fact that Collage is a design-time CMS, a significant technical challenge was figuring out how to create the appearance of a dynamic run-time site within Collage’s design-time environment while still supporting Collage’s built-in asset management capabilities, staying within Section 508 usability guidelines, and ensuring that search engines can index the site.

Palantir, a Serena partner, used standards-compliant dynamic HTML (DHTML) to pull off the front-end design. We leveraged Collage to the hilt to push as much of the design as possible into master template pages, so site administrators can update content without worrying about design interference. The technically sophisticated School site, like the more straightforward Museum site, is managed by a small staff with limited technical resources.

To meet the Art Institute’s ongoing needs, Palantir combines keen listening with best-in-class platforms, custom-built tools, and hardcore database wrangling to come up with solutions that sing. And the Art Institute of Chicago, a world-renowned treasure, now has a Web presence worthy of its stature.