www.bentley.edu

2006 brought big changes to the way we do web at Bentley. Our small group pulled off a complete visual redesign and rebuilt our information architecture, while still supporting the web demands of a large institution—and that was just the first quarter.

Convergence

Did I mention that our team was also converting approximately 80 academic and departmental websites from static html pages to our dynamic content management system? Our previous setup divided the Bentley website into two sections. While those divisions were more obvious to the Bentley community, it often left our visitors confused. Our goal was to eliminate this division and any redundant, sometimes conflicting content, to create one comprehensive Bentley website. My primary contribution during this part of the project was to architect the content management system to support the thousands of pages that were being added.

Architecture

Learning from previous Information Architecture (IA) changes, we decided to take a fresh approach this time. IA is in constant evolution - there’s no getting around that. In the past we created problems for ourselves by tying the URI to the IA hierarchy. This time we went with the philosophy that Cool URIs don’t change, and moved just about every “main” folder out to the root of the website.

Moving forward, we can change the IA as needed, without breaking links or bookmarks. As a bonus, the majority of our stakeholders were pleased to have shorter web addresses.

Design

After the convergence, the website was weighing in at well over 10,000 pages. Our in-house designer delivered a clean look-and-feel that was consistent, yet provided the flexibility needed to personalize a department or academic center.

Content is King - we hear, and often say, that expression all the time. With our new design, we encourage strong content; in fact it is a necessity. Poorly-crafted content makes the entire page look anemic in this design; Well-crafted content comes to life. Images stand out without having to compete with the shell of the design. Instead, the design steps back and compliments the content, providing the balance that is often missing in site designs.

Build

A year earlier, I had taken our table-based layout and completely rebuilt the structure based on cascading style sheets (CSS) for layout. So I went straight to work redefining styles to match the new look. In the previous switch to CSS-based structure, we made great strides in the accessibility of our site - this build expanded upon those principles.

A large portion of the work in this stage was in the content management system (CMS). With the number of pages involved, I needed to make sure we were going to be able to have the required flexibility. Perhaps a page needed a larger area to display its content. Another page may not need to have a left navigation. It was a balancing act to customize the CMS to handle the needs of our contributors, without creating an overly complex system or process.

Launch

As planned, the new design and information architecture was launched on March 30, 2006. Immediately, we received positive feedback from our users on the aesthetics, as well as the navigation and interface.