By Sydney Joa Freelancer
Western will be unveiling a new design for its website, with the official update day set for May 15.
Many of the changes are cosmetic, including a shift from a red banner to a black one. The new website, which is set to be complete by the 2015 fall term, has also made deeper changes to the basic functionality of the site itself.
While the official roll out date for this update is later this month, the project will continue development over the summer so as to not affect the students’ and faculty’s ability to access the
Western website during heavy traffic times like finals.
Students and faculty will still be able to freely access both the Western homepage and the WOU Portal sites while the changes are being made.
With the complete website slated to be finalized by fall term, those who visit the site during summer term will see each page changing almost daily.
The decision to make these changes mainly has to do with mobile access; the current website lacks true mobile friendliness.
The web provider utilized for the WOU website has started to list and rank web users by whether the website is mobile friendly and in order to elicit a better ranking for wou.edu, the mobile friendly switch was necessary.
Aside from the company push to update the site, looks and general updated design were other catalyzing factors.
“This new design will be generally more user friendly and definitely more cohesive,” said Danielle Gauntz, the lead website designer for Western.
Each department’s page is getting an updated look alongside with the university’s home page.
Newly designed pages for the departments will feature a series of new, easy access majors and programs tab to better locate general information. Each one will also feature a specially designed look to go with the department.
The use of more visible, easy access links and tabs will make getting around the new and improved sites much easier and browsing time more efficient.
Although each department page is getting plenty of individual attention, a large portion of the attention is also being focused on making each page more accessible from one another.
Or, as Gauntz puts it: “The geography of the site will be much easier to navigate.”
