Assessment

• 27 October 2007
• David McKelvey

As I’ve mentioned before, the primary step we are undertaking in the redesign is to assess our website in all its aspects so that we can determine the best course moving forward. To this end, we will be hiring one or more consulting firms to give us good advice about what they think our strengths and weaknesses are in light of our goals. While this list is by no means fully inclusive, here are the major elements we will expect them to address:

1. back-end systems: do we have the right mix of hardware, software, skill-sets, and training?
2. trillium: what future does our cms have?
3. information architecture: how should we alter our information architecture to better standardize it across the entire website?
4. visual design: we need to make our website more compelling and bring it into alignment with the strategic marketing initiative, what should it look like?

As part of the process we will also be specifically asking the consultant to interview representatives from many of the major constituencies across, and outside of campus, from prospective students to alumni, students, faculty and staff from each college, and college leadership. And the design process must include usability studies to make sure that our next website is easy to use.

Dan Terrio, Tom Krattenmaker and I have formed an ad hoc committee to put together a list of potential consultants, based on past work and the references provided by other institutions that have also undergone this process. With Dan and Tom’s oversight, I will be writing a Request For Information that will be sent to our short list of consultants capable of handling this level of work.

We are still in the investigatory stages, so it’s too soon to report further now, but I’ll report more in the coming weeks.

Filed Under

• Content Management Systems
• Redesign
• Trillium