Web Design Contract Consultant

After three months, I'm finally ready to explain what my current job is. Here it is in a nutshell:

I am updating the University of Minnesota Extension Health and Nutrition program website.

Let's break apart that kernel of a sentence.

Extension: I didn't really know what extension was all about before I came to the University of Minnesota, but it has a long history. Basically, the "cooperative extension"  of a land-grant university brings research-based knowledge to (rural) communities with the intention of making community members' lives better.

University of Minnesota: My local land-grant university. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 gave land to the states for them to develop or sell; proceeds went toward establishing colleges that would focus on teaching agriculture, science and engineering.

Health and Nutrition program: Extension usually focuses on the areas of agriculture/food, home/family, the environment, community economic development, and youth/4-H. At the U of M, Health and Nutrition (H&N) falls under the Family Development area (agriculture and food tends to address the production side versus consumption). 

About 90% of H&N's energy and resources go toward Simply Good Eating, Minnesota's delivery system for SNAP-Ed. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - Education is a federal/state partnership that supports—you guessed it—nutrition education for people eligible for SNAP benefits. H&N has Extension Educators (EEs) and Program Coordinators (PCs) distributed across twelve regions of Minnesota, managing paraprofessionals called Community Nutrition Educators (CNEs) who do most of the actual educating.

Updating: Extension's website is migrating, program by program, from a more rigid, cramped template...

UMN Extension's front page in January 2010, courtesy of the Way Back Machine.

...to more open, flexible template.

UMN Extension's front page today.

Part of my job, then, is to take all the content currently on the H&N page, review it, and figure out how to make it look good using the new template. But that's not all. H&N wants to expand their site, creating big "buckets" (categories) of information that make sense for its various audiences. But that's not all. H&N also wants to develop more and better content, to become a destination for health and nutrition information for Minnesotans.

This means I work closely with a number of people. I take orders from the H&N program director about the big picture. I follow rules and regulations laid down by the Family Development project manager. I asked EEs and PCs for ideas, clarification, and feedback. And I rely on my best buddy, the web production assistant, to take my Word documents full of URLs, cut-this's, and change-that's, and turn them into functional web pages.

Website: I'm building a framework, which is only half the battle in this Age of Social Media. And it's plenty of work for now.

There you have it. I'm being called a consultant years ahead of schedule, I'm managing multiple projects, and I'm learning valuable new skills. For what more could I ask?