UNCW’s homepage recently underwent a redesign. The new homepage launched in early January. UNCW’s Web site, which contains more than 50,000 pages, is one of the most effective tools that the university has to communicate UNCW’s mission and values to a wide-spread audience.

“With changing technologies, design trends and overall expectations in web communications, the time had come for a comprehensive update,” said Director of Marketing Mark Hurt.

 The process has been ongoing for about 18 months now. The new homepage was designed with input from students, faculty and staff through surveys. Also, more than 70 hours of focus group sessions were held to solicit feedback from the campus community.

The new design features a wider and centered format with intuitive navigations. Hurt said that this cleaner design was one of the major changes to the site. This type of design also allows for more photography on the homepage. Another major part of the redesign is a focus on prospective students.

“The current site targets prospective students while serving the needs of current students, the most frequent users,” Hurt said. “Targeted landing pages—such as research, arts, outreach, parents, faculty/staff—focus on specific audiences with their most requested information organized for easy access.”

The last time that the homepage had a redesign was in 2005. Because of changes in technology and trends, the homepage is redesigned about every 30 months, according to Hurt. However, it is too early to tell when the next redesign will occur.

Other redesigns in the past year include the Cameron School of Business, which launched the redesign of their Web site in January 2010. The Watson School of Education Web site went live in August 2010, and a new UNCW admissions site launched this past September. Feedback from these sites helped the Web designers to know the design direction for the overall UNCW site.

Now that the homepage redesign has gone live, the UNCW Web redesign team will undergo the process of migrating the remaining UNCW sites to the new design. The order in which the remaining sites will undergo the redesign depends on their relationship to the homepage and the complexity of content and Web traffic.

“The feedback has been extremely positive and constructive, especially with reporting broken links or concerns as to why some links were chosen,” Hurt said. “Soon all of the UNCW Web sites will reflect the new design in a way that communicates our message, mission and value more effectively to our audiences.”