Brian Nemerovski maintains the Eastern Michigan University
Admissions Web site — one task among a dozen or so that
make up his workday. He's not a Web designer but, thanks
to a 2008 redesign by EMU's Web communications and new
media team, he manages one of the cleaner, more effective
sites in the emich.edu universe.
 |
WELCOME HOME: This screen capture illustrates
what Eastern Michigan University's new home
page
for the Web might look like. The new look for
the
site is expected to launch in mid-August. |
"We've been surprised at how much the new site and its
partner, Ask EMU, have cut down on phone calls and e-mail
inquiries," Nemerovski said. "And we have good intelligence
that students are getting the information they need without
having to contact us. That means they can get it at 1:30
a.m. in Bangalore, India, if that's where they are."
Eastern Michigan's Web team turned the admissions redesign
project into something of a test run for the University's
new Web site, making www.emich.edu/admissions a
prototype of what's to come when EMU's new Web site goes
live in mid-August.
"The admissions site proved to be a good pilot project
for a lot of reasons," said Rhonda DeLong, Web communications
and new media director. "It brought into play issues about
how you maintain sites ... And the whole international
presence, that will follow from that project, was really
informative for us. It gave us a whole different perspective
on how to communicate with non-native (English) speakers...
"We're really trying to look through the user's eyes,
and that means coming up with a site that's well-designed,
navigable, simple, clean and gets you where you want to
go."
The Web team — DeLong, designer Suzanne Szopo and
developer Scott Shaper — had already looked at
Web sites from more than 100 peer institutions, competitors
and innovators to get a sense for trends and common practices.
They'd studied the way users approach the Web site; what
they need and what they don't; and have since bounced ideas
back and forth with a 23-member committee made up of people
from all over campus.
And one request kept rising above the others — make it
simple.
"I don't mean kindergarten simple," DeLong said. "I'm
talking about clean, clear, intuitive. When I look at it,
I should 'get' it."
On a site as broad as EMU's, simple is anything but. The
Web team is directly responsible for the 200 or so pages
that receive most of the traffic, but www.emich.edu includes
about 150,000 different pages, the vast majority of which
are managed by people like Nemerovski.
 |
NEWS FLASH: This screen capture illustrates
what
EMU's News, Arts and Events Web page will
look like.
The intent is to make campus news; theatre,
art and
dance activities; and other campus events
more
active and engaging for viewers.
|
Many of the old sites were built using standards that
are now outdated. They don't play well with certain technologies,
like mobile Web applications. And they don't meet standards
that help people with disabilities use the Web.
The new design won't look exactly like the admissions
site, DeLong said. In fact, Admissions itself will be tweaked
to match the new look. But many of its features — the wider,
horizontal orientation, the navigation bar, the lack of
menus that show up only when you mouse over them (and disappear
if your hand happens to drift) — will stay. Users will
be able to choose from four color schemes (black, white
and two shades of green) to customize the look on their
own computer.
And the Web team also will work with colleges and departments
to create custom templates like the one Nemerovski uses
in Admissions.
"I think they've used a lot of what they learned on our
site (to design the University site)," Nemerovski said. "We
wanted, first and foremost, to have a site that was more
aesthetically pleasing. We're in the recruiting field and
that's very important. And, functionally, we wanted to
streamline things so functions for different students are
handled the same way."
Pages for similar programs — like Daily Tours,
Eastern Fridays and Sit-Down Saturdays, for example — have
a consistent look, with corresponding information in consistent
places.
"I certainly wish I had more time to make our pages perfect," said
Nemerovski, who adds content to the body of the page through
a few straightforward steps. "But it's very attractive
to me to be able to plug admissions-related content into
the framework of a page that's nice to look at, and know
that I'm making good pages just by putting in the content."
Editor's Note: A related and updated story will be
published in either the July 14 or Aug. 11 issue of FOCUS
EMU.
