Western Website Redesign

Issue 47, Winter 2011

by Marie Raney

The Western website redesign project is a ten-month effort with a goal to deliver a new Drupal-based website in September of 2011. The Homepage Committee consists of the Working Committee and its Advisory Board. The Working Committee presented the first stage of its findings to the Advisory Board on Monday, February 7. This first stage, Features Definition, presents the features, information, and capabilities that will be available in the new site without reference to the design or layout of those features. The features chosen to be represented on the site are a direct response to the understanding of the site's primary purpose and audience.

Purpose of the Western Website

The goal of the redesign effort is to convey a sense of who we are while presenting useful content in a compelling format that invites participation and return visits, turning visitors into new students, employees, donors, and involved community members.

This goal expresses two basic requirements:

1. Convey a sense of who we are. The branding committee has recently completed their efforts to describe verbally and with colors and logos who we are and how we are to present ourselves. Therefore, to meet this requirement we will attempt to convey the Brand by the types of features that we include, and, later, by the designs and content that we present in the website.
2. Present Useful Content. Useful content is content that helps visitors to accomplish their goals. This implies that we understand the goals of the primary audience, and the information they need to complete these goals.

Audience for the Western website

Note: Since the current website is heavily used by our internal audience, it will be necessary to develop a different "home page" or starting place for internal audiences to accomplish their own goals. We call this the Intranet. This will require website development, training and communication in order to successfully achieve this goal with minimal disruption to university members. This is not part of our charter for this project, but its importance cannot be overstated.

The website goal, above, also implies an audience for our website: those people who will become new students, new employees, donors, and involved community members. Therefore the audience for our new website is the external audience, e.g., those that are not current students and employees of Western. The external audience includes groups with disparate goals including:

• ENROLL. The largest and most significant audience for the Western website is defined as prospective students and their families trying to determine whether Western is the college for them
• CONTRIBUTE. We also need to serve potential supporters including alumni, community members and other visitors who wish to contribute in some way to life at Western
• CONNECT. Thirdly we need to serve our alumni, community members, visiting faculty, the legislature, and other visitors wanting to connect with Western in some way through events, communications, faculty research, or job opportunities

Data Gathering to Determine the Site Requirements

In order to determine what information our audience requires to Enroll, Contribute or Connect, we used a survey on the current homepage for five days to gather information from more than 1000 prospective students and other external community members as well as current Western students, faculty and staff. You probably participated in that survey and we thank you very much for both your participation in that vital data-gathering step as well as for your patience while it was going on. This data was used to develop the Features list and is also available on the web at http://www.wwu.edu/redesign.

In addition we talked more in depth to a small sample of students to get a more experiential view of how students look for colleges and what they look for in a university website. We also collected information from the Viking Village Community Forum on how our current homepage could be improved. This thread was started in early November and ran actively for a week or so. These results also informed our Features list.

How Redesign relates to Branding

Branding is an entirely separate activity from the website redesign. The Branding Committee and the Lyric company did the research and design that led to the Brand and has so far resulted in several "products" including a logo, a tagline, the list of Brand characteristics, a color guide and some guidelines for the usage of these ("Brand Guide"). The website redesign committee will be responsible for implementing the Brand on the top few levels of the university site, but was not involved in researching or designing the Brand itself.

Thirdly, we surveyed dozens of university websites to get confirmation of what other universities were providing for their viewers.

Next Steps

With the Features list composed (see www.wwu.edu/redesign) we are starting the next stage of the project: Design, and the third stage, Models. Design is the look and feel (imagery, colors, and motifs) of the home page and sample lower pages, and Modeling has to do with interactions with the page and the user and also the flow between the pages. Modeling is usually done with "wireframe" sketches whose purpose is to determine the flow of information and actions. By starting work on both stages now we hope to maximize the recursive character of design elements which influence element flow which in turn influence design elements. We plan to present Design motifs after spring break and Modeling in June.

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