|
By Matthew Winston
Faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends of the University of Georgia who regularly visit the university’s homepage (www.uga.edu) may soon notice the site has undergone a facelift.
 UGA will launch a new Web page March 30, redesigned to improve top-level access to the ever-expanding content and resources available on UGA’s Web sites.
The Georgia Web Group is responsible for the design and maintenance of the university’s core Web pages. The UGA homepage and the second-tier pages, which can be accessed directly from the homepage, are the group’s primary responsibilities.
The group also handles the scores of e-mail messages that come in each day--from questions about undergraduate admissions to queries about a professor’s phone number and suggestions about Commencement speakers.
The Georgia Web Group is comprised of Bert DeSimone, University Computing and Networking Services; Virginia Benjamin, UGA Libraries; Jim Crouch, student affairs; and Matthew Winston, University Communications. Although these people make up the core working group for UGA’s Web site, they routinely seek advice and assistance from other graphic designers, Web masters and public relations professionals throughout the university community. Such was the case with the redesigned Web site.
“We didn’t just plop this design concept on a computer after hours,” says DeSimone, who spearheaded the redesign effort. “We started out with some agreed-upon fundamental goals. Then after we experimented with a few things, we asked about 100 different people from all over campus, and even some alumni living in the area, to take a look at our page and offer comments and suggestions.” According to DeSimone, the GWG identified seven criteria that drove the redesign. The goal was to improve delivery of the information that users wanted, as determined by input from site visitors and UGA Web usage statistics.
“It’s been hard work, but it’s been fun,” DeSimone says. “Nobody in this group has big egos, so if one person came up with an idea and it got shot down, we just moved on to the next idea. Believe me, that scenario happened a lot during this process.”
Visitors consistently indicate that they want items such as university news and sports information to be more accessible. They also want the ability to search for other sites or to search for phone numbers and e-mail address of students, faculty and staff more easily.
“The usage statistics support the sentiments of those visitors,” says Benjamin. “Among the most frequently accessed pages on our sites are the search pages and the pages displaying university news, sports and calendar information. So the first thing we tried to accomplish was pushing that type of information right to the top. Users will find links directly to those popular sites as well as search engines right on the front page.”
Benjamin notes that the news area will give visitors up-to-date, breaking news. “If school is closed for bad weather--this will be the place where people can find that news,” she says.
Another goal was to provide better access to instructional resources and to create a dynamic “Featured Sites” area. “The featured-sites area will allow us to elevate some of the lower-level pages--departments, student groups and others--to the front page from time to time,” says DeSimone. “If a page has current information and is really interesting, we can certainly help direct some attention to those sites.”
The new Web page does not differ much from the current page--by design, according to the members of the group. The primary goal was to provide better information to Web users, while preserving the core information that visitors have come to expect.
“When people visit college Web sites, they expect to find certain information on the front page,” says Crouch. “Basic information about the university, direct links to admission information, key phone numbers, information for visitors and pages about student life are pretty standard sub-topics on school pages. We did not want to completely alienate users who have grown accustomed to the old pages and who would be forced to re-educate themselves on how to navigate through new pages.”
|
