Photo By Eric Pilgrim | Officials at U.S. Army Installation Management Command say the new site will be more...... read more read more
An office at Fort Knox is harboring a secret; a secret they are days away from revealing.
Community Relations professionals at Fort Knox Public Affairs are putting the final touches on a new official website that, when launched, is expected to make finding post information easier and consistent at Army installation worldwide.
The website, located at home.army.mil/knox, is expected to officially “open for business” Sept. 2. It has been a long time in the making for John Campbell and Kelly Appelman.
“Hours and hours," said Appelman. "Hundreds of hours have been spent by John and me getting this up and going.”
Appelman, who started on aspects of the website shortly after she arrived at the office in November 2018, said the hardest part of the experience for her occurred in the beginning, around March this year when work on the site picked up steam.
“There was a little bit of a learning curve,” said Appelman. “I spent some time trying to figure out the system. Once I figured it out, it’s fairly simple to do since: just very time consuming.”
Much of their work has involved transporting all the information from the old site to the new site.
“We didn’t want to leave anything off or copy and paste it incorrectly, so this has forced us to pay attention to details,” said Appelman.
In some cases, however, they had to have the information scrubbed first before including it on the new site. One of those cases involved the Fort Knox history page.
Fort Knox Cultural Resources Specialist Matthew Rector had discovered some new information that increased the accuracy of Fort Knox’s history, which he corrected and submitted to Appelman and Campbell last week.
Having been charged with migrating all installation websites into a unified web content management system, leaders from U.S. Army Installation Management Command three years ago developed plans to revamp an army of websites that were not consistent in functionality and formatting.
The decision to streamline the process developed into the newest system that officials are calling the IMCOM Enterprise Web, which uses Concrete5, a commercial off-the-shelf content management system. Most Directorate of Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation sites are already on the system.
Fort Knox Network Enterprise Center has maintained the post's current website, at www.knox.army.mil, with content review conducted by Fort Knox Public Affairs. With the new system, Fort Knox Public Affairs will maintain it with reach-back to IMCOM PAO for assistance with the more technical facets. This move allows IMCOM to ensure continuity and consistency at every aspect.
“Now, with the new sitemap that we have put out there for everybody to follow on this new site, when Soldiers move from one garrison to another they should be able to navigate very easily to where the information is located,” said Neely Snyder, Enterprise webmaster, IMCOM Public Affairs.
Appelman said she thinks people will like the functionality of the new website.
“The homepage is a lot cleaner and is displayed differently. It will be more user-friendly,” said Appelman. “Once you figure out where the menu bar is, there’s less guessing about things. Before, you would ask, ‘Is this a garrison directorate or a support office?’ Now, they’re all in the same garrison tab.”
While the sitemap, menu and graphic design are all set, as are the names and locations of the pages, officials at IMCOM said there is still room for local tailoring.
“The homepage allows for customization but we’ve had to follow their lead,” said Appelman.
Appelman recommends the new phonebook as a great starting point for those looking to find unit information.
“The phonebook is going to be very helpful,” said Appelman. “It’s alphabetical; you just figure out where you want to go and almost all listings in that phonebook are linked to unit homepages.”
| Date Taken: | 08.30.2019 |
| Date Posted: | 08.30.2019 10:16 |
| Story ID: | 338003 |
| Location: | FORT KNOX, KENTUCKY, US |
| Web Views: | 66 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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