Visitors to Columbia’s newly designed homepage are now greeted with a more sleek and simple presentation of the University featuring attractive scenes of Columbia and New York City that change each time they visit the site.
Response to the new and more sophisticated homepage, which launched last December, has been favorable, according to University officials. The process to implement the new site began with the University’s Web Advisory Committee, chaired by School of Continuing Education Dean Frank Wolf ’71GSAS. “The old homepage was too busy,” he said. “It had too many buttons, and many of them overlapped.”
Todd Hardy, the executive director of Digital Knowledge Ventures (DKV), which develops, hosts, and distributes the University’s online programs and resources, added that the homepage hadn’t been updated since 1998. “In this business, that’s a very long time,” he said. After soliciting and receiving input from faculty, administration, and undergraduate representatives, the Web Advisory Committee and DKV set about reconciling the competing interests and demands. Everyone agreed that the site was in dire need of an overhaul, according to Wolf.
DKV started its analysis in May by reviewing the sites of five peer institutions: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, and Princeton. Hardy’s team then worked its way through the process of improving the navigation throughout the site, simplifying the presentation of information on the homepage, creating templates to foster a consistent look and feel among the secondary pages, and improving the site’s aesthetics.
More changes that will enhance the site’s functionality are planned, including a University calendar scheduled to go up later this year.
