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About the Process

In the summer of 2005, the MSU Web team, a partnership between Libraries, Computing and Technology and University Relations, began a redesign of the MSU home page. The site launched in February 2006. The new design is based on an extensive, research-driven process incorporating Cascading Style Sheets, which benefits accessibility by separating structure from presentation.

Current best practices in Web development were applied to bring the extensive MSU Web environment under a unifying umbrella comprised of more than 30 pages. The site was developed to conform to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations for web development.

Project goals and objectives

In redesigning MSU.edu, the Web team devised a plan to update the site to meet the following objectives:

Institutional and advancement goals

  • To advance MSU's teaching, research and outreach mission; meet end-user priority needs; and support institutional advancement objectives
  • To showcase MSU programs and provide other dynamic content sought by users

Audience

Audiences were originally determined (2003) through stakeholder interviews. For this redesign, we verified those groups through usage statistics and user surveys.

Top three:

  • Current students
  • Prospective students
  • Faculty and staff

Then:

  • Alumni and donors
  • Parents and families

Results

Extensive research played a major role in this project. Due to our previous successful redesign, we began with a very careful evaluation of the current site, which consisted of:

  • A review of usage statistics for a five-month period, which was comprised of 42,268,364 sessions
  • A review of the top 20 search terms from the same five-month period
  • A peer site review of more than 1,800 schools, including all of “America’s Best Colleges” by U.S. News & World Report, and other Big Ten universities
  • Review narrowed to top five favorite sites for: design, layout, features, type/style of navigation, use of best practices.

Great care was given to ensure audience feedback played a major role in the redesign process. In a beta-test survey distributed on March 10, 2006, users were asked, “How does the new MSU home page compare with the old site? Twenty-seven percent said, much better, and 34 percent reported it was better than the old site.

Additionally, a usability evaluation was commissioned on the redesigned MSU home page by the MSU Usability & Accessibility Center, a unit independent of either of the units that make up the MSU Web team. The Web site was evaluated in one-on-one usability sessions, including undergraduate students, graduate students and students with sight disabilities. The summary of this study included the following determination:

“Overall, participants were quite successful in locating links to certain information within the MSU home page Web site, such as finding the academic requirements for transfer students or the hours for the MSU main library.”

A list of recommendations was made to further improve the usability and accessibility of the site.  These recommendations were reviewed by the Web team and implemented in the launch of the new site. Some of these changes included:

  • Making the audience portals more obvious to readers
  • Reducing the size of the home page graphics so more of the content on the page was visible “above the fold”
  • Highlighting the page the user is currently on
  • Making the sub pages more distinguishable from the home page
  • Adding quick links to the home page

The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition fighting for standards that ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all, posted the following about the MSU home page after its launch:

“Kudos to Michigan State. Michigan State University launched a redesign of its Web site, yesterday. Designed and developed with best practices that follow Web Standards and Web Accessibility, the university Web site looks good and validates to the XHTML strict doctype. Congratulations to everyone involved with the redesign!”

The evolution of the MSU home page hasn't ended with the launch of the new site.  The Web team continues to meet on a regular basis to discuss and implement solutions in an ongoing effort to improve MSU's Web presence. Although the development continues, the Web team has met its chief goal for this redesign by adding a significant number of accessibility features. These features complement the use of assistive technologies to help make the site usable to the broadest possible audience – everyone from those who use assistive technologies to those with a low-end browser or computer.

One of the most obvious ways we have been able to gage the success of the new look and feel of the MSU home page has come in the response from units who have wanted to adopt a similar look and feel. Some that already have:

Many more MSU sites, already in development, are forthcoming with this new MSU look. We hope the contents of this Web Style Guide will be of use to others who are interested in our development approach.