Hoping to create a more user-friendly resource, University officials have redesigned and reorganized the Arts and Sciences and Trinity College website.
Last week, after almost two years of work, the staff of Arts and Sciences Computing along with representatives from the administration launched the new site. The address, http://www.aas.duke.edu/, remained the same.
Following a letter from William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, regarding web standards, Melissa Mills, associate dean for computing, began directing the efforts.
"Website design is an art full of technical subtleties which can either aid or hinder broad accessibility to the essential information our websites require," Chafe wrote in the letter.
"A site with clear navigation and useful, timely information is imperative," he added in a statement. "The new site is a quantum leap forward."
The original site, created in 1994, contained limited features such as the Duke directory search engine and a few webpages. In 1996, web designers added a link to online course synopses.
But over the past two years, designers made more significant changes to the site, said Forrest Smith, director of network and desktop services for Arts and Sciences.
"We also designed a very fundamental template page for each department in A&S so that we could provide some kind of web link for the departments until they started developing their own," Smith said in a statement. "The structure of the website reflected, to some extent, the organizational structure of Arts and Sciences."
The new site also provides users with a search engine and a site index. The links are color-coded according to the targeted viewers. For example, all undergraduate-related links are colored green.
The most drastic change, Mills said, was the number of direct links on the homepage. Previously, the site had only seven links; it now contains 47 links.
Although the site is tailored to a range of viewers--current and prospective students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni and visitors--designers paid special attention to the needs of undergraduates. Kay Singer, associate dean of Trinity College, said she referred the site to a few students who gave her positive feedback.
"If [students] actually go to the site, we will get more publicity and then they can let us know if they think there is anything to be changed," Singer added.
Staff members from the Cynthia Sulzberger Interactive Learning Lab also took part in designing the website.
Kevin Witte, who became the lab's director in March, said that most of the site was already complete at that time. "When I first got here, it was common for different departments to save over each other's pages and for material to overlap," Witte said. "We've gotten a lot better and smarter about managing that by making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing. My main job now is to facilitate the rollout."
Mills said there are still some bugs to be worked out with the site.
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