How many clicks does it take to get to the bottom of the new Duke website?
After seven years in its current incarnation and three months of planning, designing, coding and fine-tuning, the University will launch a redesign of its main website at the end of the month.
Currently in a beta test run, the new site will become accessible to users via a link on the current www.duke.edu site at the end of the week. The Duke News Service is spearheading the effort with technological assistance from the Office of Information Technology.
The redesign brings a new, more compact appearance that provides quick links to some of the most requested sites off of the main page. Officials hope the new site will be more navigable and user-friendly.
"Duke's webpage is our front door to the world," said David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications, who is leading the initiative. "We want to begin to create an online commune for the Duke community."
Only the welcome homepage and general pages - such as "About Duke," "Arts," "Staff & Employment," and "Duke & Durham" - will take on the new design.
"We are not trying to redesign every webpage for Duke University," said Ben Riseling, production manager for the new site. "We are trying to leverage the good work of what people are already doing. Duke's decentralization and diversity is one of its great strengths."
Many of Duke's departmental websites, like those for the law school, libraries and human resources, have received independent makeovers in the past year, while still others remain with only basic features.
Riseling said the University is considering creating a new office to provide web services to departments to help facilitate revamping efforts.
The University averages a million hits to all of the duke.edu sites on its web servers each day, with peak days running closer to 1.2 or 1.3 million and "light" days - weekends and holidays - tracking in the mid-hundreds of thousands, according to OIT.
The redesigned pages feature a split design in which navigation tools and content information are balanced on the page. Efficient navigation is the main priority.
"The [current] site is about seven years old and has evolved historically, with new links being added over the years," Jarmul said.
"We're now really stopping and thinking about the organization of the website. How do you take this huge mass of material and organize it so you can find it all in one place?"
Users will find that internal pages are just one or two clicks away from the main page instead of four or five. For example, a student currently looking for Merchants on Points eateries must click through five menus in order to reach the relevant page.
On the new homepage, a user can rollover the "Students" tab on the left column of the page, producing a list of seven options. Clicking once on the option "Student Services" will bring them to a page with a long list of services, including "Merchants on Points," thus eliminating three clicks from the process.
"The key to a successful website is for people to be able to easily find what they're looking for, both because links take them exactly where they expect and because the searching capabilities deliver the right information," said Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Tracy Futhey.
The designers solicited feedback on the current site from meetings with students, faculty members, alumni, administrators, deans and a multitude of offices including those of development, undergraduate admissions, student affairs and auxiliary services, Jarmul said.
From those meetings, a general direction for the website was set forth - one that focuses on relating the Duke experience to users both in computer clusters in Perkins Library and in Internet cafe on the other side of the world.
Duke first commissioned Elizabeth Kairys, an award-winning print designer who has created websites for Mother Jones, Salon and the World Health Organization, for the redesign of the Duke News website. Impressed by her work, the University contracted Kairys for the University's main site.
Kairys looked to the sites of Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin, among other higher education and corporate sites for inspiration. Thirteen drafts and even further tweaking later, the new site is now just about ready for the public.
"We will continue to solicit feedback because there is no way in three months we've been able to get it completely perfect. We are viewing the site as a work in progress," Riseling said.
In the following months, the University will also unveil a more encompassing and powerful search engine provided by Google, a new content management system to help facilitate the sharing of information among internal sites, and possibly individualized web portal pages for students and others.
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