Objectives: Why we want to rework the site

The web has become an essential way of doing business. Having an attractive, useful, up-to-date web site is crucial to admissions, alumni relations, and on- and off-campus communications. Lawrence's current web site has been on line for more than two years, a long time on the web. While the site is a great improvement over what we had before and is very content rich, it doesn't adequately represent what Lawrence can do. 

Our goal is to redesign Lawrence's web site to achieve the following objectives:

1. improve usability
2. update the look
3. better serve our primary audiences:
1. Prospective Students
2. Current students, faculty, and staff
3. Alumni, especially younger alumni (within the last 5-10 years)
4. Other groups, including news and media representatives, colleagues at other institutions, families of current students, employers, and the local community.
4. have a site that is as nearly comprehensive as we can make it
5. a site that is designed, not assembled piecemeal

We feel that the primary goal of redesign should be better usability in terms of accessibility, interactivity, and navigation. 

In addition, we reaffirm our commitment to our design principles first articulated in 1998:

• Ease of navigation and of use for those unfamiliar with Lawrence and its Web site is a key first principle. 
• A second is that the site should be accessible to visitors using a broad variety of platforms and should perform well over a variety of Internet connections. 
• These two principles imply a number of corollaries: 
  • The site must be well and clearly organized, with its top level offering no more than 7-9 points of departure. 
  • As visitors move around within the site, they should be given visual clues as to their location and be provided with both means of direct navigation to key subject areas and a method to retrace their steps. 
  • The information available on the site should be both broad in scope and deep in reach, reflecting substantively the variety and complexity of Lawrence University. 
  • In deciding what material should be made available on the site and how it should be presented, imperfections of organization and presentation will be tolerated for the sake of completeness. 
  • The site should "work" on a variety of Web browsers, including Lynx and early versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer. 
  • Pages should display quickly over a typical dialup connection
• Finally, some thoughts regarding the "look" of the site:
  • Page design should allow presentation of critical information within a 640 x 480-pixel screen; most pages should be no more than two-three screens in length. 
  • Pages from the site should print within a standard 8 1/2" page width. 
  • Graphical design of the page should reflect a clean, crisp, "minimalist" look. 
  • "Web-safe" colors should be used in text and graphical elements.

Specific Issues: What things we want to fix or make better

Short term: 

• adapt the current template to allow more flexibility in terms of navigation and positioning of links
• use layered navigation techniques to improve subsite navigation: people find it relatively easy to move around the top layer of our site, but have a harder time locating and retrieving information farther down the hierarchy
• increase the use of "included" text to update pages
• validate to HTML 3.2 and ensure that our web pages meet W3C accessibility guidelines
• improve our use of images by developing and organizing a web-accessible database of web-ready photos and icons
• implement a web-based calendar to improve access to information about events at Lawrence
• develop procedures to minimize or eliminate server downtime

Long(er) term:

• separate content from presentation using XML: the eXtensible Markup Language is the future of the web and will enable us to reformat the same content for a number of different audiences and purposes
• develop content management capabilities with a version control system
• move to a database-driven web site

Tools: What we're going to use to fix and make better

We recommend that a core group of web developers have access to, and be trained in, Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

People: Who's going to do all this work

We recommend that Lawrence hire a web design firm or freelance web designer to provide us with a graphic design and page templates.

We recommend that Lawrence move forward with plans to hire a full-time webmaster. We also recommend that each department or office that wishes to maintain information on the web should assign someone that responsibility and that these departmental webmasters work closely with the campus webmaster to maintain quality of content and presentation. 

Timeline: When will we do all this stuff

Excellent question.