March 4, 2004
New homepage created by students
For the first time in its short history, the UW home page (www.washington.edu) has been designed entirely by students.
The new home page, unveiled March 1, was designed by a student team, all in the Visual Communication Design program in the School of Art. It consists of Jason Tselentis, graduate student, and Dan Johnston and Jim Nesbitt, both seniors. The students worked under the guidance of Doug Wadden, professor of design in the School of Art. The team also worked closely with the technical staff of Computing & Communications.
The new design is the culmination of an effort that began 18 months ago, when then-President Richard L. McCormick appointed a committee of faculty and administrators to develop principles for design of the home page.
“A key premise of the entire project is that this design is oriented primarily to the needs and interests of external visitors,” says Jack Faris, vice president for University Relations. “The UWIN or individually-tailored home pages created through MyUW will be the primary way that most UW faculty, students and staff will enter the site.”
The new home page, according to Harry Hayward, director of strategic communications in University Relations, is intended to present the University’s “face” to those who are not on campus — potential students, parents, friends, donors and others. “We want to engage visitors visually, offer them an invitation to learn,” he says.
“We involved students in the design because we know that they have done good work for other departments on campus, and we wanted to give them a shot at doing something that would be highly visible, ” Hayward says. The students ended up presenting to the home page committee five completely different design approaches. After some back-and-forth among the design team, the committee and staff at Computing & Communications, the final design was realized.
“The students learned a great deal about designing a page for a large and diverse audience,” Hayward says. “They had to examine how the page would appear on different computer platforms and different browsers, and how the page could be accessed by persons with disabilities. They also had to address the issue of not overloading the campus servers, and of creating pages that would load quickly for people using dial-up lines from their home computers.”
The final design was tested by faculty in Technical Communications and also in the Information School, who routinely evaluate the effectiveness of Web pages as part of their research.
The design team and the Office of University Relations are interested in comments from users. They may be sent to univrel@u.washington.edu. “University Relations will continue to manage the page and to make incremental changes that respond to the changing communications needs of campus units and our external audiences,” Hayward says.
