College Website Draft Designs

November 2012 - Take the Design Survey now!

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New work from the Homepage Team

The group that brought you the new Western Homepage last year is working on a design for the Drupal site that will support the needs of colleges and academic departments.

College Design Survey

The designers from various groups across campus developed four draft college designs for a fictional college at Western. We held an initial survey on these designs through August 10, 2012 and received about 170 responses.

Testing Layout and Graphical Design, not Content

Layout of the content areas (see gray area below in schematic diagram) is left to the colleges and departments - we are planning to provide multiple options including up to three content columns and combinations of wide and narrow columns. For the purpose of showing the designs in the survey, the designers chose content layouts and graphical elements that they found attractive although these layouts would actually be up to the college or department.

Page Structure

After working together for several months our designers ended up with some agreed-upon page structure with these basic areas of the design laid out as in the diagram.

Note, for example, that although each design featured the logo at top left, the treatment of the logo still varied as to whether it was superimposed on the banner beneath, or placed beside it, whether it was shadowed or laid flat on the surface, etc. Likewise the menu bar appears at the same location in each design, but the graphical treatment varies.

Next Steps

The survey will remain open for a week. Then we will review the results and this will guide the final refinements to the design. We will then prepare the design as a Responsive Drupal theme. We expect to have the theme operational by winter term 2013.

The Designs

Below are each of the draft designs. Click on the images to see a bigger version. The large image is the College Home Page, Level 2 would represent a main menu item or Department Home Page, Level 3 would represent a detail page within the site. Next to each design is listed the survey findings about each design - what aspect of the design performed most favorably, and least favorably, and where (besides the content area) the designer incorporated opportunities for customization by the college.

Thank you for your interest. Please direct comments and questions to webhelp .