After a (not so) brief hiatus from writing, I’ve been welcomed back to write a monthly post for the Stratepedia blog to share some design-related thoughts and useful tools. For my first post back, I wanted to give a quick overview of a major project that has been in the works for several months now – a complete redesign of the www.kucrl.org website!
Julie Tollefson, CRL’s Director of Communications, and I headed up the redesign effort. What prompted our initial thinking on this was the rollout of a new web design template at KU last year. As part of the university community, we wanted to meet the design criteria set forth by KU. We were also finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the day-to-day content updates that were coming to us from all reaches of the Center. For this reason, we decided to look into using a CMS (Content Management System) to help us organize our content and make it easier for others to help us keep things up to date. After doing some research, we decided to go with ExpressionEngine because of it’s ease of use, vast flexibility, and great user support.
Once we decided to go ahead with the redesign, we had to go through and organize all of KU-CRL’s web presence to figure out how it should all piece together. We created a 9 page sitemap that allowed us to look at what we needed, what we didn’t need, and what we wanted to improve upon. We also hoped to incorporate some new features of the web into our site to make it easier to communicate with the public about the kinds of things we do at the Center.
So, without further ado, here’s the website before our update:
And here’s the site after our update:
A few of the new features we implemented are:
- A rotating slideshow featuring important KU-CRL news stories at the top of the front page
- A news blog with RSS enabled
- A front page listing of all 6 of our research divisions
- An events calendar
- A page to showcase featured KU-CRL people, projects, and stories
- Searchable research article and staff presentation listings
- and visible links to the KU-CRL Twitter and KU-CRL YouTube accounts
We also wanted to consolidate some of the content and clean up the design, allowing for more white space and easier navigation.
Head on over to www.kucrl.org and take a look for yourself! We welcome any feedback you might have, so feel free to leave us some comments at www.kucrl.org/feedback.
I should mention that this is the first stage of a broader web site upgrade for nearly all of the KU-CRL affiliated websites, so I’ll be posting again next month with more information on other parts of our site as well as some more thoughts and tips on design.
