Rebuilding the Front Door Updating the University's Homepage By Drew Hahn, with Donna Filonovsky drew.hahn@nyu.edu

Figure 1. The redesigned "front door" to the NYU website.

Redesigning any web page is a significant task. There are so many aspects to consider in order to create a site that is useful, visually attractive, easy to download and navigate, and accessible to the vast majority of users. Redesigning the NYU homepage (www.nyu.edu/), the electronic gateway to the University's website (NYUWeb), presented its own special set of challenges.

When initiating a redesign, the NYU Office of Marketing Services and Electronic Publications (MSEP) always begins by looking at content. Ultimately, designing a good website is about finding the most effective way to present the site's information. The visual design should aid in the presentation of the content, but is rarely the starting point.

Since the NYU homepage's last redesign in 1998, many more facilities and services at the University have become electronically accessible. Therefore, our office began our redesign by identifying all of the main websites at the University. These include schools, academic offices, and a variety of facilities and services.

While many of these websites were already linked from the existing homepage, we knew from the volume of e-mail to webmaster@ nyu.edu that people were having difficulty finding them. After reviewing webmaster e-mail from the past three years, we noticed many of the same questions, and therefore targeted the new design to address these problematic areas.

We took the additional steps of determining what type of commonly requested information was missing from NYU's site and then integrating it into the new version. This included information about area hotels, restaurants, and parking facilities, as well as tourist information about the Village and New York City.

Once we had identified our content, which consists primarily of links to other areas of NYUWeb, we began working on a navigation structure. The important thing here was to maintain some consistency with the previous version of the homepage, so as to avoid making it too difficult for those people already familiar with our site to find what they are looking for. At the same time, we wanted to structure the navigation so that there would only be one heading under which the user would logically expect to find whatever it was they were looking for. We did this by creating the following menus: About NYU, Academics, Admissions, Research, Resources and Services, Searches and Directories, Maps, and Help. Eight is typically the maximum number of categories a designer would use to ensure the greatest comprehension and intuition by visitors.

Within those sections, we further organized the links into logical groups and named those groups. When working with a lot of links, this type of sorting helps visitors to quickly assess the layout of the page and make a determination about where to find what they are seeking. By also choosing groups that are based on the nature of information, and not necessarily based on the organizational chart of the University, we made it easier for those less familiar with NYU to reach their destination.

While this content-based navigation works well, it was important to consider the various types of people who visit the NYU homepage. These roles include high school students looking for an undergraduate college, current college students looking to transfer or attend NYU for graduate school, and faculty members looking for teaching resources, to name just a few. It would be absurd to assume that one table of contents could satisfy all of these diverse audiences. Therefore, we didn't just create content-based navigation, but also role-based navigation.

At the top of the homepage, a visitor can now select a table of contents that is specific to the type of information they are seeking from NYU. The roles are: Prospective Student, Current Student, Visitor, Parent, Faculty or Staff Member, Alumni or Friend, and News Media. When clicked on, these sections offer a list of links to the resources most relevant to that type of person. This is a significant change from the previous version of the homepage.

Figure 2. The redesigned Academics web page.

Once we identified the content and selected the form of navigation, we were ready to tackle a new design. This is often challenging, as you face the tempting option of using new technology that, while potentially very useful, can slow the page loading time and isn't available to everybody, especially those with disabilities using special browsers. We tried to avoid features that would only be accessible to a small number of people. Luckily, a good designer knows how to do a lot without having to use all of the fancy technology.

Our office created several different designs that were intended to work well with the new navigation; present NYU as an institution of academic excellence; download quickly; and look like a welcoming site to visit. After considering the different concepts, the new design was chosen.

The chosen design was a visual system that is classic in nature, yet flexible enough to show the diversity within the University. The design approach is simple in principle, relying on the structure of an underlying grid while incorporating modern elements, such as rollovers, that are appropriate to the Web. The treatment of these rollovers is subtle yet refined, and the grid, while very structured, allows for a great deal of flexibility. The color palette is traditional and subdued, incorporating a deeper, more sophisticated purple than the one that appeared on the previous site. To complement this new color, a light tan and brown were also used.

Each page has a different photograph that not only adds a splash of color, but also functions as a storyboard, enhancing the subject that it represents. Space below the photos allows for more information about the main subject of that page, which makes the site more suitable for browsing.

We hope that the new homepage provides a front door to the University's various web resources that will remain useful for the next two to three years--the average life span of a website design. With more than 100,000 pages of content visited by more than a half-million people monthly, NYU's website is one of the largest of any higher education institution. A recent Newsweek/Kaplan National Guidance Counselor survey lists NYU as fourth best in use of the Web among universities nationwide. We hope that our redesign of the homepage helps NYU continue to build upon this impressive foundation.