By Allison Schoenauer
Elm Staff Writer
Washington College’s web site is preparing for another face-lift.
The preliminary designs of WC’s new home page, created by web design firm White Whale Web Services, were revealed on March 26 in a public town hall meeting.
According to White Whale representatives President Jason Pontius and Web Designer Janie Porche, “The goal of this redesign project is to make the site more like WC itself.”
The team hopes to accomplish this by making the site reflect the active nature of the students and staff at WC. It will be working with an on-campus team of students and staff from different departments, but primarily staff from College Relations and Marketing and the Web Advisory Group, consisting of faculty, staff, student, and alumni representatives.
On the new website, large, attractive photos and interesting headlines will link visitors to different campus events, academic departments, school services, sporting events, and interesting stories that focus on student and staff accomplishments.
The links used most often by students, staff, faculty, and other frequent users of the WC site will be at the bottom right corner. The header will link less-frequent visitors to various services and departments.
The new design is meant to be as user-friendly as it is attractive.
According to Web Developer Shane Brill, “We’re restructuring our navigation based on site traffic patterns, and the site search uses a customized autocomplete feature.”
These helpful tools are intended to make navigation easier and searches more tailored to the visitor’s needs.
Future possibilities of site customization and ease of maintenance are also being taken into consideration with this new version of the website.
“While each past redesign introduced a new web innovation, every site edit required going through a human who translated everything to HTML,” Brill said. “The forthcoming site runs on a self-propelled engine. It builds in easy tools for anyone within the campus community to make changes to the site.”
This self-propelled engine, also known as a content management system (CMS), is designed to help manage the College’s expanding web site. Before the arrangement with White Whale, the growth and upkeep of the site had been trusted to a small group of web designers, headed by Brill.
According to Meredith Hadaway, vice president of college relations and marketing, “Once the site ballooned beyond 8,000 pages, it became clear that we needed to implement a CMS so that various constituencies across campus could participate in a more dynamic site.”
White Whale’s LiveWhale CMS, is being used by the College as a foundation to build the new site.
Pontius said that one of White Whale’s major concerns is making the web site “for everyone.”
“We don’t think of the new web site as being strictly a tool for recruiting prospective students,” said Pontius. “In reality, we think of the website as a place for everyone to have a voice. We wanted it to be authentic.”
An installation date has yet to be announced. Video of the town hall meeting, and mock-ups of the new home page can be found at The Washington College Redesign blog, http://washcoll.redesignstory.com/blog.php.