Tufts is giving its online presence a wide-ranging makeover, with a recently updated Tufts.edu Web site and a revamped alumni site on the way.
The refurbished Tufts.edu launched on Aug. 20. Administrators expect to unveil the Alumni Association's new Web site on Oct. 5, capping a year of work on both sites that the creators said will better represent Tufts as a diverse and dynamic institution.
"We really wanted to be Tufts and not be anyone else," Director of Web Communications Bill Denneen said of the new Tufts.edu. "We wanted to embody the global perspective and the forward thinking and bring those things into the site."
In renovating the new sites, the university is making an effort to meet the needs of its Web audience.
"We wanted to highlight the vibrancy of the campus, wanted something dynamic and enticing," Efi Georgiou, the senior art director of publications, said of the university site. "We also wanted to meet target audiences' needs externally and internally."
The alumni Web site has not been updated since 2000 and needed an overhaul, said Andrea Schmitt (LA '90), co-chair of the Alumni Council's Communications Committee.
"The old Web site didn't capture the dynamic nature of the alumni and the prestigious nature of Tufts," she said.
Changes made to the alumni site were informed by a number of studies conducted several years ago through the consulting firm Sametz Blackstone Associates, Schmitt said. These studies were part of a broader marketing effort to help the Alumni Association create a new branding message that defined it as an institution separate from the university.
Using the preliminary results of these studies, the Alumni Association hired the Web vendor New City Media to build the new site.
To identify how best to improve the alumni site, New City Media asked alumni to perform specific tasks on the site, in order to determine what was easy and difficult to access, and the steps needed to find information.
The vendor used the testing results to design a more user-friendly Web site. "The functionality of the old site wasn't great, and we've worked on that," Schmitt said. "With the new site, alumni will find information in a much more central location than they could before."
The budget to overhaul the alumni Web site, which stands at around $120,000, allowed developers to use the most current technology available. Schmitt said that although the constantly evolving nature of technology makes it difficult for the university Web sites to stay up-to-date, the Alumni Council's Communications Committee felt that it was important to make the effort to stay technologically current.
The new Web site will feature more photo and video content, and include a new Google.com calendar feature that will allow alumni to send information about alumni events directly to their own Google calendars, according to Associate Director of Alumni Relations Mrinalini Jaikumar.
"The new Web site will be much easier to use and more interesting for alumni to visit," Jaikumar said. "We tried to incorporate new features and technology that alumni would want to use."
The Tufts.edu renovation is also focused on staying current. Changes to the site are meant to improve functionality and better represent the university as a whole. "We wanted the site to better support the Tufts University brand, be more exciting, better reflect the Tufts experience and to be more user friendly," Director of Publications Gail Bambrick said.
Denneen said that the response to the new site after several weeks of use has been positive. "People have been happy about finding things more easily," he said. "We have also gotten a lot of feedback about how it looks. It's a fresh look for Tufts."
Changes to the site include an updated homepage that retains the same large photo format as the previous site but allows for more news content, a new "Get to Know Tufts" page including a short list of university tidbits and a search bar incorporated throughout the site.
The Tufts.edu redesign grew out of a process similar to that used for the alumni site, including focus groups and usability studies conducted by development and communications administrators within the university.
"We built this site from the ground up to make sure we had an architecture to make sure people could find things easily," Bambrick said. Managing Editor of Web Communications Georgiana Cohen added that the Tufts.edu changes were based on the needs of the site's visitors. "We really looked at how people used the Web site, and we structured the Web site based on what people wanted [and] needed," Cohen said.
