LC Redesign: Strategy Phase Complete

• 6 August 2008
• David McKelvey

Prior to my arrival here at Lewis & Clark, the institution went through a very significant strategic communications process. This process highlighted communication issues that we as an institution needed to address to be more successful in communicating to our various audiences. (Haven’t seen this? Read the  Message Platform.) Long story short, one of the major initiatives to come out of this process was the need to redesign the website, and in particular to bring its design and content in line with who we are as LC.

So, we went through an RFP process to get some help with what we expected would be a major effort and after six proposals and two presentations, we selected White Whale (WW), a small company that consults on educational web design and development. Frankly, they seemed like the coolest, smartest people around and in mid-March when we began to work with them, we learned our expectations were right on.

The first thing we did was set out what out goals were for this phase of the project — the strategy phase. Specifically, we outlined three primary goals:

• complete a visual redesign of the home pages, to make the site better reflect who we are as a community;
• re-architect the navigation and content to make it more accessible and again better reflect us; and,
• assess the future of our content management system to decide what features or abilities it should have, and whether Trillium would be able to fulfill those needs.

The goals above are the big picture, and each has developed a number of elements that are also significant, but we’ll tackle those in the discussion that is to follow.

And what is to follow? There is a lot of discussion to come here — White Whale started us off with meetings across the three campuses with all kinds of people and the discussions that we had have formed a good part of the direction this redesign has taken. Since that time, we’ve worked through the major goals above completing our strategy phase and are ready to present all of this for comment from you, the LC community.

So, without further adieu, we’ll start with the visual design in the next post, then bring in further discussions on the navigation and content, as well as Trillium in the next few posts. And look for posts from Jason Pontius, president of White Whale will be jumping in here to author and comment as well.

I do hope you’ll participate. We’ve spent a good bit of time talking about ampersands and word marks, in addition to how to foster “community” and reduce the siloing that occurs both without and within the three schools that are Lewis & Clark. But that isn’t enough, we want your thoughts, impressions and opinions on this redesign.

Join us.

David W. McKelvey
Director of New Media
Public Affairs and Communicationsmckelvey@lclark.edu

Filed Under

• Information Design
• L&C Calendar
• L&C Search
• Redesign
• Trillium