After collecting input from students and faculty about what they wanted out of a redesigned website and looking at boring wire frames, the Office of Communications, which is overseeing the redesign of Georgetown.edu, has finally received three full-on design concepts from its developer, Happy Cog.

The concepts, entitled “Wayfinder,” “Clarity,” and “Warmth,” respectively, each feature a floating footer that will “provide targeted content and links to specific audiences,” Communication’s Scott Anderson writes.

Students will see links like MyAccess and HoyaMail, for example, while faculty and staff will see links to “MyAccess, Access+, governance and others.”

“Please let us know what you like — and don’t like – about each design,” Anderson asks, “and let us know which one you prefer. What were your first impressions when you see the designs? Do the designs convey a sense of what Georgetown is all about?”

We’ll start with “Warmth,” the last concept: it’s ugly as sin. But Vox is a big fan of “Clarity.”

Georgetown is inching ever closer to a revamped website.

Last time we checked in, they were collecting input from campus on what students and faculty wanted to see in the site’s first makeover in seven years.

Now, the Office of Communications has finished the “research and discovery phase” of their project to redesign the outdated, unavigable georgetown.edu, and has their hands on a potential outline for a the new site, which it posted on the Georgetown Website Redesign blog yesterday.

The plans, shown above, are encouraging. From the looks of things, either proposed home page will provide access to more different parts of the site than it currently does, advertising heretofore buried links like “Libraries,” “Our Schools,” “Next Admission Deadline,” “Latest Sports Scores,” and, ahem, “Make a Gift.”

For those of you titillated by Blue & Gray, it seems there will be several different ways to organize University news.

The new website isn’t perfect—one can still hold out hope that the Office of Communications will at least think about making the homepages of the different schools more uniform—but there’s only one thing that has Vox truly confused: is the text on the “Subpage” slide placeholder text, or is Jack the Bulldog really going to get a page equal in space and prominence to “Residence Life” and “Diversity on Campus”?

The University’s Office of Communication has been working on a redesign of the University’s main website for a few months now, and they recently launched a blog to get feedback about georgetown.edu and issue updates about how the redesign is progressing.

According to the blog’s first post, the website redesign team has heard from over 80 members of the Georgetown community so far.  The main concerns they’ve expressed are that the new website needs to “deliver compelling content in a variety of formats; enhance functionality and use of multimedia; improve navigation, search functionality and user experience; and redesign mobile interfaces.”

The blog explains that this will be the first redesign in seven years, and the Office of Communications hopes to have the new website up in a year.

Lauinger Library finally got a spruce-up.  Unfortunately we’re not talking about the physical space—we’re talking about their web presence.

Today, the library revealed its newly redesigned website, and it looks pretty snazzy. With a nice blue and gray wave theme, the new site features well organized sidebars and three separate search options on front page.

The library also devoted prominent spots on their new hompage to featuring delightful library productions like this “Mysteries of the Reference Desk” video (Georgetown YouTube Madness candidate? Absolutely!) and highlighting some of their lesser-known partners like the Writing Center and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

According to the Internet Archive, the Library’s website hasn’t been revamped since January 2005, so they were in for an upgrade.  You can also give them feedback on the new website and suggest tweaks you’d like to see here.

TheHoya.com in happier times…

For the past couple weeks we’ve been wondering what’s going on with the Hoya‘s website. TheHoya.com has been displaying a variety of things—a standard issue “down for maintenance” message, ads for a web-hosting service and, briefly, their tech guy Ryan J. Zambon’s personal homepage—but not the actual Hoya website. Their website currently shows an article about the passing of Father King underneath the “down for maintenance” banner.

Doing maintenance during the summer’s no big, but being down for a whole two week stretch makes it seem like you’re doing a little more than standard-issue touch-ups.

According to Hoya Editor in Chief Kevin Barber, the site’s down as they switch servers in preparation for the eventual launch of a new website:

We’re currently in the process of switching our server prior to launching an entirely new web site. (No specific timetable on that.) The regular site should be back up fairly soon; for the time being we’ve restored our main two blogs [The Hoya Paranoia and Outside the Gates], and we also posted a story about Fr. King on our temporary main site because it was important news. Most of our new content during the summer thus far has been on our blogs.

It’s quite irritating, but the summer is obviously the best time to do this sort of work.

Photo from einet.net.

Earlier this week we learned that Georgetown will be revamping its archaic website next year (granted, in University-speak that could mean anything from next year to the year after current pre-frosh graduate, but progress nonetheless).  As a tribute, here’s a brief history of the Georgetown website, courtesy of the always entertaining internet archives.

1997-1999

Not a bad looking website, considering it was built over a decade ago.  But once you get past the homepage to some of the sub-pages you see how rudimentary it really is.  Check out the search page with detailed instructions detailed instructions on how to do these newfangled internet searches.

Read the rest of this entry »

The computer the current website was designed on

Been getting that annoying survey pop-up every time you visit the Georgetown website? Thankfully, it’s actually for the greater good. Yes, the University is finally updating their antiquated website!

A brief foray through the internet archives reveals it hasn’t been significantly updated since 2002 (for a little perspective: that’s the year Britney Spears came out with “I’m a Slave 4 U” and the year current freshmen were 12 years-old).

University spokesperson Julie Green-Bataille writes in an email:

Yes we are hoping to redesign Georgetown’s website in the next year. I doubt I need to tell you how out of date it is. The survey you see is one step to start getting feedback from current users on how and why they use the site so that this information can better inform our efforts.

Hurray!