Oregon State Productions Blog

This past summer we formed a project team and steering committee to address the design of OSU’s home page and top-tier pages. The home page is OSU’s public face, with more than 70,000 hits per day, it regularly reaches a broader and more diverse audience than any other communication.

The timing for this redesign is ideal, given the fact that the look and feel of the home page hasn’t changed in several years, and also the new Brand Identity Guidelines for the university were officially launched in September.

A team of advisors and Web professionals from across campus are collaborating on the redesign project. Most of the work from this summer focused on the information architecture, the physical structure of the links and navigation was determined, and the allocation of the screen real estate for different tasks was determined. The work produced a wireframe sketch of the new home page. This is our roadmap for moving forward. We will now be filling that wireframe with design, content, navigation and imagery.

There are three teams currently working on the redesign. A Visual Design Team is creating mock-ups of the look and feel; the Content Team is determining parameters for links and feature content, and the Technical Team is deciding on the architecture and performance. A steering committee representative of the entire campus is reviewing the process.

Our goal is to have a new home page ready to demo and launch for the new calendar year. I’ll be posting regular updates on this blog so that our users can follow the progress and provide feedback. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

CATEGORIES: Projects