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After five years, the School of Social Work (opens new window) is excited to announce the launch of their new website. One of the first websites I worked on when I started in the Web department as a student assistant has been completely rebuilt from the ground up.

Information architecture

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It all started with a content audit. Every single page was analyzed and assigned a goal. If the page didn't have a goal it was not included in the new site. This allowed us and the school to really examine what was being published and why. Luckily we built a way for the CMS to generate these exports with all the current pages, files, age of each page and last publisher.

We then took the pages and re-organized them into a task based navigation. Previously, we organized the information by audience. This made sense at the time but after sitting down with real students and having them complete some very basic tasks, we discovered they were missing a lot of content. They set out to look for certain keywords and although those words were there, they were hidden behind the "Prospective Students" menu item. Something that was continuously overlooked.

Visuals

With new navigation, goals, and purpose to the homepage, comes a new visual design that highlights the school and its users needs. The major visual change from the previous (left) to the new (right) design is the focus on people instead of their building. Social work is all about people and we wanted to make sure we showed that off. We were lucky enough to be provided with a massive amount of student photos with permission from the school. We incorporated as many as possible to set the tone and feel of the site.

The homepage has quite a few more elements on it but is far more organized than before. The main menu is still horizontal which allows for the large centerpiece impacting image. We also made more room for promotional elements which allowed us to pull them out of primary navigation items. And lastly, a separation of news and events gives the user a clear understanding of the great things going on at the school and the upcoming events they can be part of without having to read each item.

Under the hood

Last but not least the code of the five-year-old site needed attention. It wasn't too bad but was written for a different era. We of course rebuilt it from the ground up. Although the new site has more visual elements we were able to reduce the page size by 20 percent and construct the page in five less HTTP requests.

We also included the address at the bottom of every page and tagged it with an hCard microformat (opens new window) to allow for machine readability.

View the new School of Social Work website at: http://socialwork.wayne.edu/ (opens new window)