Interview: Giving to the U of M Web site redesign

This is the ninth in a several-part series of interviews with communicators who have redesigned or updated their Web sites. If you have redesigned your site or have a site to suggest for these interviews, let us know.

In this edition: A team effort! Glen Beltt, Christina Morgan, Mike Peluso, Todd Proctor, and Karl Raschke on the Giving to the U of M Web site

What were your reasons for redesigning the site?
Our team had a few main goals. Above all, we needed to more effectively highlight the terrific multimedia features being created within the Foundation that show donors what their gifts are helping to achieve. To do that, we included a jQuery content rotator that's working pretty well so far. Incidentally, we'd love to share our multimedia content with other units around the U through Media Mill or whatever other means is most convenient to use as appropriate within their own sites .

In addition, we wanted to update the Giving site in various ways: to strengthen our continuity with the University by using the new templates, to modernize the visual look of the site, and to update the code to make it more semantic and accessible using tableless CSS and clean HTML. Those changes have made the site easier to maintain as well. Also, we implemented Dreamweaver templating for the first time.

What kind of user research or user testing did you do?
Mostly we ended up relying on the "Rule of Common Sense." Because we overhauled our site in phases, and had to work in the redesign between a lot of other projects, we're doing our research and testing more after the fact, primarily through informal feedback and review of our Google Analytics stats, which we use extensively. We've recently learned about some interesting usability tools that we're beginning to test out.

What factors went in to the organization of the site?
Aside from the need to highlight multimedia content, we took a lot of our cues from the University templates. Our navigation and other aspects of our information architecture were already pretty well settled and appeared to be working well. One challenge, to which we're still refining our response, is how to best take advantage of the wider view port. We were optimized for 800x600 before, but now we're up to 960 wide. We've added a narrow right column to most pages, and we're gradually developing ideas for how to use the extra space. The 960 width provides some nice multimedia options, too.


How did you think about the visual design of your site within the
context of the University brand?
The Foundation is a separate
entity from the University, but our mission is totally in support of the
University's broad mission so we want our site to reflect that. Still,
we wanted to add features that makes us distinctive while still staying
within the University's web policies and templates. Hopefully, we struck
a good balance.

What was the biggest challenge, and how did you
get past it?
Probably just finding the time to get things done
amidst other demands. With our move to tableless CSS, we had the typical
problems to overcome with browser compatibility issues. We also
experimented with different approaches to featuring multimedia to see
what would work best, but we just kept plugging away until we found
something we were happy with and that worked well across all browsers.
Mobile devices are an ongoing challenge.
 
How did you manage the
project and keep it on track?
All of us contributed in different
ways. We didn't have a hard deadline other than "as soon as possible,"
but it became more and more exciting as we saw how things were coming
together. In the end, we did a phased launch where we pushed out a new
home page before we updated the rest of the site. That's not ideal, but
it helped motivate us to get the rest of it done quickly. The feedback
on the new home page was so positive that we knew that we didn't want
the rest of the site to lag behind for very long!

What tips do
you have for other units redesigning their Web sites?
We talked about this, and our thoughts
included: "Don't be afraid to try new things and ideas" and "If you need
additional resources, don't be afraid to borrow from elsewhere." I'd
add that if you're doing this as a team as we did, it's really important
to be open to everyone's contributions and work to develop a unified
vision of what you're trying to achieve together and how you're going to
get there. It's also good to not try to do too many things at once.
Whether it's because of how fast the online world changes or something
else, it seems like sometimes solutions to difficult problems just
surface over time if you keep working at it and pace yourself in making
changes.

How are you evaluating the redesign's success?
Google
Analytics is our most important tool right now. We can see that we've
been able to generate much more traffic to our multimedia content
especially, which is the result of a variety of additional tactics
including e-mail campaigns, syndication efforts, and some social media
support -- from YouTube and iTunesU, for example. The continuing growth
in online giving and informal feedback that we've receiving from our
audiences, which has been overwhelmingly positive, also are encouraging.