Navigating the University of Miami’s webpage may become a new and exciting experience in the coming weeks. A redesigned website will be launching either later this month or in early March.
Web and Digital Communications and Marketing, a team working in University Communications, got the opportunity to create a redesigned website about a year ago and has been hard at work trying to improve the university’s online software.
The team, headed by Robert Yunk, had four very specific goals in mind when the project began. These were to establish a more adequate primary tool to build and manage website content, publish and govern a library of global experience materials that can be used to design websites and other digital products, manage an inventory UM web sites and web people, and work with people in UMIT to strengthen hosting options and hosting standards.
Yunk also mentioned that students and faculty will see the biggest changes in the top-tier pages on the website. The website’s “front-door” was the team’s number one concern, as it had not been updated since 2008.
Although redesigning the website was a complex process, Yunk said it ultimately came down to information intake. Current students, prospective students, faculty, staff and alumni were all surveyed before the team started to redesign the website.
Yunk thinks this was crucial in creating a website that was best suited for everyone involved with the university.
“We reported [the information from surveys] monthly to an advisory group consisting of people who manage the primary sites linking from our homepage,” he said. “All of this intake has helped us a lot.”
Overall, the team believes that the redesign will help students, faculty and alumni navigate the website in a much simpler manner. All components of the website will be much more unified once the redesign is complete, and this should allow for more efficient use.
Yunk said the standard scheme throughout the site will “help anyone browsing the website feel more grounded,” as all sites and pages will appear the same regardless of the device being used to access the webpage.
Although huge strides have been made in the redesign of the webpage, Yunk insists that there is still more work to be done.
The team’s ultimate goal is to create a system that can assist all areas of the university in building and managing their own sites.
“I’m extremely proud of all we’ve done working as a team so far, but I’m really focused on continuing to strengthen and build,” Yunk said.
Anyone interested in joining other students working on the redesign team can email umcommunications@miami.edu.