Tufts' website came online with a new look last week as part of an ongoing effort to facilitate easier navigation of the site and integrate news content into Tufts' home on the Web.
Web Central, the main communications web group at Tufts, placed ten new photographs on the site that will rotate on a regular basis. The group also added an area for press releases, simplified the older pop-up menus, and moved the search function higher on the page for more convenient access to important links.
Though not considered a "redesign," the new page allows for more flexibility, said Web Central associate director Carolyn Nelander. "It gave us a little bit of space and gave us the ability to introduce more dynamic content and work with another group to deliver news," she said.
The news area of the site includes links to stories from Tufts' public relations website, E-News, an addition that was partly a response to feedback from users.
"Faculty, staff, students, and alumni were all very interested in news coming out of Tufts and said it was something they'd like to see," said Peter Sanborn, who manages E-News. He added that the news area also allows Tufts to better service those unaffiliated with the University.
"To anybody coming to Tufts for the first time, it helps to be able to educate them a little bit," he said. "If they're a prospective student or a parent or a government agency interested in funding a grant, they can pretty quickly get a sense of what kind of place Tufts is."
According to Nelander, other schools' sites usually take on one of two forms: they are either information-packed "portals," or overly simplistic "plain janes" that offer five to seven navigation choices which quickly lead the user to his or her desired destination.
"MIT has very straightforward graphics that change every time you go or on a fairly regular basis," Nelander said. "Yale has a more high design, it's flashier, but has quick navigation." Tufts' site falls in the middle.
"We do provide quick navigation, and also some announcements," she explained. For future development, "we're looking at both [styles], at what each might offer."
The kind of news a website can offer depends on a school's size, Sanborn said. Though most schools' websites do feature a news component, the content and quality varies from larger state schools to smaller colleges.
"There's a huge range out there in higher education," Sanborn said. "We're pretty innovative about the quality of content we put up there."
Still, some Tufts students say they do not use the site for news. "I only go to the website if I need to find someone's phone number," junior Sarah Lawrence said. "It's perfectly easy to use, but there's no information on the site that I don't already possess."
Future updates will assess how students and outsiders make use of the site. "We need to delve more deeply into some usability issues," Nelander said. "The information architecture needs to be improved... to get to things more easily."
Specifically, Web Central plans to study how users find upper level sites. Since home pages are treated as gateways to more specific sites, web designers will try to ease the process of navigating to these extensions off the main page.
"The usability testing is to make sure that things are laid out the best way," Nelander said. "We really need to [look] more in-depth at how things are placed and how people are using it... we need to look at making sure the navigation is the right kind of navigation."
Web Central plans to conduct more targeted studies of how contingencies from each of the University's schools make use of the site.
"We tried to time this [change] with students coming back," Nelander said, adding that further changes will probably be made at the beginning of the next academic year to avoid confusing users. "We try to achieve that balance between changing things and not shifting so much that people have to relearn things."
