Update on UC Denver website reconstruction
(Oct. 2, 2008) Redesign of University of Colorado Denver web pages will become apparent starting this month, with upgrades happening weekly and monthly through August 2010. This is a complex project that must be conducted in phases.
In October, newly designed and organized pages for the administrative team will go live. After that, a new School of Education and Human Development site will go live. This site was developed on the school’s initiative, but followed design and infrastructure guidelines that will be applied to future redesigns. In November, a “beta” version of the new main page for the university will be made available for testing by UC Denver students, faculty and staff. Once that testing phase is completed, the UCDenver.edu URL will link to that new page.
The page and its navigation will undergo continuous improvement based on feedback from users. The websites for 12 schools/colleges/administrative units will undergo intense planning through December, with redesigned sites beginning to appear in January. Those sites are (in alphabetical order): Admissions, Alumni, Budget and Operations, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Facilities Operations, Human Resources, Institutional Research, International Affairs, Integrated University Communications, Medicine and Registrar.
Here are the criteria that were used in selecting these first sites:
§ The extent to which the site can immediately support key objectives such as student recruitment, donor and alumni relations, public support, patient recruitment, etc.
§ The amount of information on the site that will be shared with other sites.
§ The unit’s readiness.
§ The current state of the unit’s site. Recently redesigned sites were put in later phases.
§ The size of the project – a criterion that cuts both ways. Small projects with low-hanging fruit could go early; large projects with long development timelines must start early.
§ The importance of web improvement in the unit’s strategic communication plan.
Several sites were redesigned in recent months at their leadership’s initiative. They will be brought into the formal redesign process in the later stages of the project, though they will be improved as new features are added to the underlying web infrastructure. Those sites include (in alphabetical order): Architecture and Planning, Bursar, Business, Arts and Media, Nursing, Public Affairs, and Public Health.
The Chancellor and his team support this phasing of the Web redesign. Much more detail about the project, including a list of Frequently Asked Questions, is available at the redesign website. You also may contact project leaders Steve Krizman and Bob Tolsma and members of their team, Jeremy Fulbright and Catherine Worster.