Q: Why are we doing this? This current site is just fine.
A: The Caltech website is ten years old, and much of the functionality has become essential to campus life (in particular, the directory), but there are more demands on a website than ours can meet with its current infrastructure. We need to update the layout and reorganize the back end so the website can better serve and continue to grow with the Institute for the next 10 years (or more).
Q: What is the scope of the project?
A: The scope of this project is what we’re calling the Caltech “Front door” – those top level pages that represent and help define the Institute. The following pages are expected to be part of the redesign, but the scope may be modified based on the outcome of the Discovery phase of the project.
- Caltech Homepage (http://www.caltech.edu)
- Board of Trustees (http://bot.caltech.edu)
- President (http://president.caltech.edu)
- Provost (http://provost.caltech.edu)
- Vice Presidents (many different web pages and websites for these offices need to be assessed)
- Admissions (http://admissions.caltech.edu)
- Financial Aid (http://www.finaid.caltech.edu)
- Giving to Caltech (http://giving.caltech.edu)
- Campus map (http://www.caltech.edu/map)
- Calendars (http://today.caltech.edu/calendar)
- Caltech Today (http://today.caltech.edu)
- Media Relations (http://media.caltech.edu)
- E&S Magazine (http://eands.caltech.edu)
Q: What’s next? What is the process and schedule for the redesign project?
A: Following a week packed with community forums and meetings with various focus groups, our design team has headed home to Portland, and they are beginning to hash out possible blueprints for our site. At this stage, they will work with us to develop what is essentially the site’s skeleton—think of it as the framing. We are considering types of content and how we can provide our users with the ability to easily get to the information and functionality they need.
Once we decide on a structural form, the team develop some prototypes for the actual look of the website. At this point—hopefully in January—we will invite all members of the community to a forum to view the prototypes and share ideas and opinions.
Then Caltech’s IMSS group will do all the coding for the new website! We plan to begin testing it next July. For that, we will again reach out to the Caltech community for help.
Finally, we will do the fine-tuning and sort out the bugs. Launch is scheduled for October 1, 2012!
Q: My department is using one of the Caltech templates for our website—are we going to be completely disconnected from the new site when it launches?
A: No. You’ve done the heavy lifting of getting your content organized and keeping it current, and we hope you can see the benefit of having it in a layout that relates to the main Caltech website. The scope of the redesign project includes website templates—yours will automatically switch over to the new look/feel, and we hope the improved design and features will inspire more departments to use one of the templates in the future.