We had a very nice start to our Monday morning when we learned that Bob Johnson has picked us as his link of the week. This is especially nice since Bob Johnson is so well respected in the Higher Ed web space. Here are some of the very kind words Bob had to say:

Hobart and William Smith Colleges: “See Yourself” Alive on Campus

Here is a really fine example of using the real estate at the top of your front page to start telling real stories of what students and faculty experience on your campus from the first moment someone comes to your website. What you’ll see is far better than the usual stereotypical image of campus buildings or smiling students that might be any campus, any time, any where.

“See Yourself” is a series of 6 student and 1 faculty visual image of 12 or so things they’ve done at Hobart and William Smith. You can easily scan the events wrapped around a picture of the person and decide which ones interest you. Pause for a moment and you’ll find a short description of that experience. But that’s not all. If what you see captures your interest, you’ll also find a link to more about that experience.

HWS promises two new “Experience Maps” each month so there’s reason to check the list as the recruitment cycle unfolds and keep the interest of students and parents, no matter when they first visit the website. Let’s hope that more faculty are included soon.

Start your experience at http://www.hws.edu/

When you visit, explore the site and be sure to note the extensive use of photo galleries, including an opportunity that’s promoted to buy HBS photos through Shutterfly. Very nicely done and yet another example of how college and university websites are expanding to integrate with other areas of the online world.

As we mentioned last week, work on Phase 3 is underway, but it’s not all-consuming! We’ve been keeping busy with plenty of other projects, too.

For starters, we’re still hard at work creating experience maps. Right now, Michael has been designing two experience maps that we plan to add to the Web site in early February. Melissa has been in constant contact with the HWS community members whose maps will be featured on the site in March and April. They’re shaping up to be really engaging, and we hope you’ll love them as much as we do.

As we mentioned in an earlier post, Phase 2 is nearly out of development, and we’ll begin testing our new Daily Update sometime soon. We’re very excited about it, and we plan to deploy that as soon as possible. In the meantime, you can learn more about new Daily Update on our Latest Designs page.

We’ve also begun planning for Phase 4 of our deployment, which we’ll begin working on over the next several weeks. During Phase 4, we’ll be redesigning the Trinity pages (Career Services, Global Education and the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning) as well as several other key offices on campus.

Unrelated to the redesign project, we’re working on some fun projects with the Office of Admissions for the soon-to-be Classes of 2012. We’re also working on a new (and awesome) campus map, a create-your-own experience map widget and some other really great new features. And, of course, the day-to-day Web updates keep coming in.

A Web team’s work is never done!

When we outlined our staged implementation plan in mid-2007, we recognized the importance of updating our academic department pages, making them Phase 3 of our overall deployment plan.

With Phase 2 nearly out of development, work on Phase 3 has been underway for a couple of weeks now, and we plan to spend the next six months redesigning several of our academic department pages.

The Web team has already started collaborating on design and content ideas for the department pages. Our ultimate goal is to create a series of design templates that have the general look and feel of www.hws.edu, while allowing departments to express their own individuality.

Once we’ve created several design options, we will confer with key members of the faculty and Office of the Provost to select final models that will best serve the needs of both current and prospective students.

When all is said and done, we hope to launch 8-10 of the redesigned academic department pages in early summer 2008, marking the end of Phase 3.

After that initial launch, we’ll begin re-visioning Web pages for the other major and minor programs of study. Since there are more than 60 overall, we expect that the process will be lengthy, but we’re dedicated to making sure all of our academic programs are well represented on the Web site.

Happy New Year from the HWS Web staff!

The first thing I would like to mention is that we will be updating this blog weekly. Please check back every Friday to see what we are up to.

Which naturally leads to the question: What have we been up to?

We have been very busy tidying up the loose ends from our launch in November. We have been in a situation where we are caught between the new web site (www.hws.edu) and the old site (web.hws.edu) because there are several database driven pages that only function in the old site and need an expert programmer to migrate over into the new site.

Initially, our short term plan was to put all of the database-driven content that we couldn’t move into an iFrame. An iFrame lets us pair our normal navigation with a window into an old Web page that contains immovable content.

Unfortunately, iFrames are not a very good solution because not all web browsers handle iFrames exactly the same way. We ran into issues when some of our users reported multiple scrollbars and other general wonkiness.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been applying our new template to the old site. Though it is a laborious and time consuming process, it allowed us to remove most of the iFrames from the Web site.

Eventually, we plan to move the database-driven pages over to our new site, and IT Services will be handling this for us.

With these last loose ends being tied up, we are now ready to move on to Phase 3 of the Web site redesign. I will go into more depth on what we are doing in Phase 3 next week, but the short explanation is that we will be redesigning all of the academic department Web sites.

Additionally, we are close to having a new Daily Update (Phase 2) for the campus community to enjoy. We should start testing it in the next few weeks, and if there aren’t any major problems, we will get it up and running as soon as possible.

It’s been just over a month since we launched the newly redesigned www.hws.edu, but we haven’t been snoozing at our desks!

Even as we continue to work on making the new site as functional and navigable as possible, we’ve begun work on phase 3 of our implementation plan. Over the past few weeks, we’ve met with many of the folks whose sites will be revamped as part of phase 3, and early in the new year, we hope to share some preliminary design concepts and content plans for those sections of the site.

We’ve also been hard at work creating some new experience maps for you to enjoy. Just this afternoon, we added two extraordinary HWS leaders to the site. After our holiday break, we plan to introduce several more experience maps, so don’t be surprised when unique and interesting HWS faculty members pop up on your homepage.

Recently, we learned that we won a CASE District II silver award for our work on the Centennial Web site last winter. It was an especially exciting honor because the Centennial site was the first project we worked on as a team. Although who knows how much longer we’ll be a team … we’ve been fighting non-stop over who gets to pick up the CASE award in Puerto Rico this January.

The holidays are coming up, and we’re all looking forward to a much-deserved break. We hope you all have the opportunity to enjoy a break of your own and celebrate a safe and merry holiday season.

The Office of Communications is pleased to announce that we have launched an enhanced and redesigned Web site at http://www.hws.edu/. The launch occured smoothly at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, November 16th, with minor adjustments being made until 8:00 p.m.Now live, visitors can enjoy a new design and map concept, which emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of Hobart and William Smith. This enhancement is the first update in a planned schedule of web implementations. To learn more, read the Timeline for Staged
Implementation.

We encourage community members to contact Web and Graphics Designer Michael DiMauro (dimauro@hws.edu) with any feedback, questions or concerns about the new design, but we ask that you wait until Saturday to send your comments so that we have a chance to get the site completely transferred and fully operational.

The Office of Communications would like to thank all on campus who have assisted with this important project. A huge thank you to our colleagues in IT Services for their time and expertise!

Answer: the lake, but there’s more to it than that.

In general our new design has been greeted with great enthusiasm, but the one question we are getting more than any other, is why we went with the color blue. Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer.

Our current website (or old website if you read this after the weekend of November 16th), incorporates two of our four Colleges colors - green from William Smith and purple from Hobart. This would seem to be a decent compromise, except that we are definitely running into a distraction problem. In our testing, users said that the current (or old) site was cluttered and hard to read.

Given that, we made a decision early in the redesign process to implement a relatively neutral design that would visually recede so that the focus could be on the content and photos, some of which are fairly complex, such as the experience maps. We chose a palette that is neutral but one that also speaks to who we are – a liberal arts institution on the shore of one of the most beautiful lakes in the country – Seneca.

So while someone critiquing the site on a granular level may feel like the blue and gray are washed out, a prospective student coming to the site is more likely to think that the colors in the photos really pop.

This isn’t a new theory, and it is being used all over the web. Think apple.com.

If you want to get a little deeper into design theory, you can think of it this way: if you have bright colors all over your site, it is similar to making every sentence in a paragraph bold. The end result is that nothing stands out, and nothing is bold. So if you use subtle colors as your framework, your content and photography can really shine.

We hope users of the new site know that we did go through many, many iterations of design with different color combinations before we landed on the blue band with the green and purple sails. We showed the site to groups of faculty, staff, students and our peers in the higher ed and design worlds before we sent it out into the community in general with this blog. The vast majority of the people we showed it to really love what we have done. We understand that this is a concern though, and we will be doing further testing as well as keeping an eye on our web statistics. If it is in the best interest of the Colleges, we will absolutely change our color scheme.

Let us know what you think! Leave a comment on this blog!

We have a new experience map to show off, and we thought that the HWS community might like to take a look at it.We mocked up a page on our current site so that it could be viewed in its natural environment. Please note: None of the links will work.Click on the image below to take a look, and let us know what you think.

Thank you for all of your feedback on the new site design. We are all very excited about the new direction, and think we have made great progress.

Another area where we are making great progress is the new way we are coding the site.

To fully understand where we have come from and where we are going will take a little Internet designing/programming history. The Internet was created with scientists, not graphic designers, in mind. So for a very long time there were no real tools to lay out a page in HTML (the language that the internet is programmed with).

Crafty designers soon realized that they could work around this inadequacy by using programming that was meant for tabular data. They could stick images into a table and expand and contract the columns and rows until it looked just how they wanted. This was mostly effective, but extremely messy.

Our old website is built with tables, and it has several problems, the main ones being:

• The code is difficult to write
• The code is even more difficult to update
• The code may not look the same on all browsers
• There are major accessibility issues

Luckily a few years back, the group that oversees the technical growth of the web, the W3C, stepped in and fixed the original inadequacy. The result was CSS, or cascading style sheets. I will go more deeply into CSS in a later post.

The important thing to know about CSS is that as we use it to recode our site, it will make our pages much easier to create and maintain. Also, our site will now be completely ADA compliant, faster to download, and easier to parse for search engines like google.

As an example, let’s say we wanted a halloween themed website (we don’t). By changing 3 images, and a few lines of code in two css files, our entire site looks like this:

While it isn’t a good idea to switch up your website design at the drop of a hat, it is nice to know that the next time we want a new look, we can focus on the graphics, and not worry about the programming.

We will be updating the blog every week with our progress on the Web site redesign. You will also see some high level discussions about Web design theory and new ideas about how we are rewriting and recreating content for the site.

Please take a look at our latest designs page to see the new direction for the Web site and to leave us feedback.