Design Meme

One of my websites has won an award. The University of Guelph website has been awarded the Gold medal from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE) in their annual Prix D’Excellence awards program. The CCAE competition recognizes outstanding achievements in alumni affairs, public affairs, development, student recruitment and overall institutional Advancement. Our last CCAE award for the website was back in 2001 when we won a Gold medal with the introduction of the previous design.

The site was assessed by advancement colleagues and external professional judges on the overall effectiveness of the homepage with regard to institutional identity; availability of appropriate and desirable links; ease of use; consideration of the institution’s audiences; and quality of multi-media presentations linked to the homepage. The Judges noted the overall strengths of the site included modern design, Web 2.0 principles, and a focus on useful, well-presented content. “The navigation is clear, the code is strong, and the writing is crisp and concise.”

“Overall, we found that Guelph’s site features clean and creative design and offers visitors an excellent introduction to the university.” the judges commented, which is something we’ve had echoed by a wide variety of people who have emailed to let us know they’ve found the site helpful.

The University homepage was to be the first campus-wide implementation of the new “brand” and needed to be created as a system of templates that could be used on a wide variety of pages.

The redesign needed to continue our commitment to using a modern Web Standards-based approach, and build on the progress we had made in making it accessible for all users.

The new website was designed in-house during a period of about one year. In designing the new site we solicited feedback from the campus community on both the old website and the preliminary design concepts. An early version of the design had a lot of suggestions for improvement, which were included in the design goals when work on a new design was begun in May 2007 with the goal of launching in August 2007.

Building on the initial design work of Cundari SFP, who developed the cornerstone and strategic branding package, I was responsible for designing and implementing the new site—in addition to posting at Design Meme I’m also the University of Guelph’s Website Manager.

In addition to recognition from CCAE, the University of Guelph website is currently ranked #9 out of 50 Best-designed college sites at CommandShift3.com.

The University of Guelph homepage is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and meets all Priority 2 checkpoints from the World Wide Web Consortiums Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Making the site more accessible meant giving users more choices in how they access and contribute to our content. For example, our news and events are available on the home page, but they could also be viewed in a desktop RSS feed reader or added to another site like Google Homepages or Facebook. In addition to feeds, many pages now use the hCard and hCalendar Microformats, which allow users to quickly add contacts to their address books and events to their calendars.

The University is now working with more external services, including The Weather Network, Apple’s iTunes, Facebook, Google Maps, and YouTube to improve the website experience for the University community, and give users more options for accessing our information on the web.

New features have continued to be added, including more audio and video content, user-submitted photos and further integration with other websites on campus.