RSS
Facebook
New site to do a much better job of ‘conveying the FIU spirit’
By Karen Cochrane
After more than one year of research and development, the university’s Web Communications team is making final preparations to launch FIU’s new home page and top-level pages. The massive project represents a complete visual, content and architecture overhaul of the existing www.fiu.edu.
Creators expect the site to debut on schedule in spring 2010.
“The new home page, in particular, will do a much better job of conveying the FIU spirit in a more impactful way,” says Senior Vice President for External Relations Sandy Gonzalez-Levy. “It will also be much more user-friendly than the current site.”
The focal point of the new site – the home page – will feature a large image and a news section that is updated frequently with university news. As part of the university’s Worlds Ahead branding campaign, a profile box will highlight FIU stories that illustrate the six attributes that define FIU: entrepreneurial, international/global, accessible, community focused, vibrant and ideally located. FIU’s new university calendar will have prominent placement on the home page.
The Office of Web Communications in the Division of External Relations led the design and technical development of the new site, which uses the Hannon Hill Cascade content management system. Matt Herzberger, director of Web communications; Fabian Alcantara, Web designer; and Andre Oliveira, Web developer, collaborated on the initiative.
Central to the design process was identifying the main users of the site and listening to those users about what they wanted in a site. Students and prospective students are the main users of the site, followed by faculty/staff, alumni, parents and donors. Feedback about the current site was not a problem: The team sifted through literally hundreds of comments users had provided via a “feedback” button on the home page. Additionally, the team conducted usability tests.
“It’s a daunting task to take care of all of these key user groups with one page,” says Herzberger, who came to FIU in 2009 from Texas A&M where he led the redesign of the engineering and business Web sites. “It’s our job to shepherd them where they want to go as quickly as possible.
“Right now, our home page is so broad that people get tripped up trying to get where they want to go,” he continued. “The new home page doesn’t have any of the clutter that the current page has.”
The FIU news team caught up with Herzberger, Alcantara and Oliveira recently and spoke to them about the new site, their design philosophy and what users can expect from the redesign.
Next week: The science behind the site. What did the Web team learn from all that feedback and research, and how have they used that to create a better site?
Other articles in this series
Our most impactful research:
Love this new design.
I am glad you are re-designing the web page because I really can't find some pertinent information when i really need it. That said, hurry with the new page already.
FINALLY!!! The current site SUCKS! As was said, there's hundreds of thousands of links that I can't find ANYTHING! Heck, I didn't even know you had a feedback button on the current site. That's how awful the current design is… It's just bogged down with links that take you 'round and 'round.
When I was in highschool trying to find enrollment information the current design made me wanna strangulate myself. UM, FSU, etc.. had a nice, smooth design to it. Once you got the "feel" for their site it was a piece of cake but FIU's site? Pffft… This redesign has been long awaited and long needed.
[…] team’s final interview about the site, click on the video below.Other articles in this seriesFIU’s new Web site, Part I: Why the redesign?FIU’s new Web site, Part II: The science behind the site/**/If you enjoyed this post, please […]