Yesterday I was asked to give a presentation at Refresh Detroit, a group of web developers/designers/usability professionals from the Detroit area. Below is the presentation.

Outline

We were tasked with the redesign of the Library and Information Science Program Web site. I started out with a general overview of our department then moved into showing the old LISP web site. It was not an in depth examination of all of our methods but a glance at our process

The Old Site & New Goals

Some of the issues with the old web site were

• Need for more university branding
• New online masters of library science degree that needed promotion
• Need for a news/events static area
• Use of a pixel pattern they use on all their direct mail pieces
• A place to promote their faculty.

We didn’t have access to their old web server or site statistics so we could only base student needs from emails and phone calls. We also used other university library science web sites as benchmarks. 

We determined the primary audience to be prospective graduate students since they only offer graduate degrees. Current Students and Faculty/Staff will have a presence but they will not be the primary focus for the homepage.

Organizing Information

Initially we pull down the site with WinHTTrack to get an idea of the size and folder structure. We then take their primary goals of the site and figure out the paths a user currently has to take to get to them. We then take those paths and chunk them together to shorten the time and organization of them for the new site.

We broke their navigation down by audience and since each section has quite a bit of links underneath it we decided alphabetical would work better than having to prioritize menu items, we did not want to make any assumptions.

Site Design

The main goal of the homepage was to create an impact, appear organized and up to date. Our mockup process is to create three designs, present them and they can either choose one or pick bits and pieces and we work back and forth with we have a design we are both happy with.

I presented the three mockups we created for the site. Each mockup has a homepage and two child pages. Child pages are pages with basic content on them, basically anything that is not the homepage. We create a two column and a full width child page to show how content will flow.

Technical Implementation

The html of the site is implemented in XHTML 1.0 Transitional because we have a CMS with a WYSIWYG editor inside which stumbles if the strict mode is enabled. It is built into a template and placed in the web content management system we created for the university. 

They ended up choosing Mockup #3. It offered enough flexibility to promote news, events, promotions and the pixel pattern did not distract from the content on the page.

Did we accomplish our goals?

Since we did not have any historical site statistics we could only rely on the new site statistics. The last slide shows the Google Analytics for the site since it launched. As you can see the top four hit pages are the goals we set out to promote with the new site. Homepage is number one of course but the online program is number two, followed by the admissions page, followed by the faculty profiles page.

See the design for yourself: http://lisp.wayne.edu/

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under presentation, tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.