Trusted launches Vanguard.edu Facelift

12/16/2009
Mark Merrick

Toward the end of last year Vanguard come to us asking to design and implement a new look for www.vanguard.edu and www.vanguard.edu/admissions. Basic goals involved:

Supporting but advancing and retrofitting the existing design which was created by Juxt Interactive (who we greatly respect at admire)
A larger news feature with rotating photos that marketing staff could easily update
A simplified home and admissions navigation that focused users on popular destinations but supported all other destinations
A re-organization of the entire site navigation with goals similar to point 2, but on a grander scale
Calendar event integration that was powered and fed by back end user manageable calendars
Ad space that did not dominate but attracted attention
Contact information that was easy to find and update
An admissions look that was similar to the home look but with elements aimed at the younger incoming students

Design

Overall the design of the page was a challenge since we were representing a university with dozens of diverse departments centered a core mission. Like all organizations, a web home page is vital in conveying a proper sense of identity, and like some organizations the Vanguard appeal needed to be broad. Vanguard is first an educational institution, but she is also a spiritual body with her own culture. Her appeal begins with graduating high school students and extends all the way to grad students, adult learners, alumni, donors, and local community members. How does one represent all of that? In our case we studied the university, compiled goals, and released our artists go to create. In the end everyone seemed pretty happy.

News Feature

The dominant item on the home page is news feature and the simple solution would have been to use Flash. While that is always an option experience told us to reconsider. Though elegant, Flash is not necessarily friendly to search engines and may offer hurdles for staff members who want to make content and look and feel updates. Since one of our goals were easy updates we chose to build a javascript based feature that integrated with one of their software's (DotNetNuke) core modules. In the end we arrived at a solution that is easy to manage, controlled by style sheets (meaning the look can be updated easily), less expensive than flash, and as a bonus, looks great on a mobile phone browser.

Calendar

For the calendar system we ended up selecting DotNetNuke's core event module. While there are some great 3rd party modules we were very pleased with the features (kudos to the team that built it). Here again we were able to meet all of goals and provide a simple event feature that can drill down to quite complex event data from one of the dozens of event providing departments.

Navigation

Redesigning the navigation is not as easy as it sounds, especially with large organizations. Vanguard's website has to offer several types of information including historical, athletic, departmental, and university-wide news. Any department left out will generally let you know it and any group of users (e.g. alumni) left out will let you know it. Part of solution here was an identity-based navigation where groups like alumni, faculty, students, etc. could find home pages featuring their most popular. In addition we had to provide a overall navigation that was easy to use, supported multiple browsers, and ideally worked on mobile phones. Again we chose an simple solution (javascript and css) that was based upon Suckerfish and lived in a simple DotNetNuke HTML module. In plain English we put together something that was editable by educated staff members and met all of our goals.

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