After nearly eight months of construction, Dartmouth launched its new homepage in August. The website, which features a photo display that changes every time the page is reloaded, was designed to make it more accessible to prospective and current students, parents, faculty and alumni.
"What we ended up doing was looking for the commonalities in all of these different audience groups and then we built a design to accommodate all of them," said Sarah Horton, one of the site's creators.
The new site was created by group of staff members known as "The HomeTeam" -- Horton from curricular computing and Rick Adams and Martin Grant from public affairs.
"Overwhelmingly, the comments have been good and we've implemented a number of the suggestions that we've gotten," Adams said.
Adams and Grant continue to make improvements to the site based on suggestions they receive from users. One of The HomeTeam's goals is to constantly update the site to better reflect the needs of the College.
"The idea was to make the website sort of an organic thing that would evolve and change over time," Adams said.
In addition to adding the rotating photo display, The HomeTeam also resurrected the "quick links" section, which allows visitors to customize the site to include the links they most often use.
Though most of the feedback for the new features has been positive, some of the negative comments has focused on the site's aesthetic appeal, Horton said.
"Some people have found that it doesn't look sophisticated enough or not 'Ivy' or austere enough," she said.
Minal Caron '09, however, said he did not see much difference between the new site and the old one.
"I like that it says what the weather is in Hanover right now, but, otherwise, it's pretty much the same as it was before," he said.
In order to determine what components were most important to the homepage's frequent users, the HomeTeam spent months using surveys, holding focus groups, organizing town hall meetings and analyzing search logs and page request logs to see which pages were being visited the most.
While functionality was a critical part of the design process, the HomeTeam also sought to increase the amount of content on the site by researching information-packed museum websites and the website for the World Health Organization. While they did look at other college homepages, they did not specifically try to emulate any other site on the web. In the end, the new site better represents the College, Horton said.
"It's become a real destination as opposed as a gateway to other sites," Horton said.
