On Friday afternoon we went live with the new-look University homepage, an altered IA that separates the material for local and international future students and new site-wide styles.
The front page has been radically altered. The aim was to expose more second and third level navigation, giving access to highly used material from the front page. The inclusion of news also reflects the success the Media and Publications Offices have had with the News and Events website. Interesting content is being produced every day there and it seemed only right to feature it on the front page. This also gives the front page a more engaging feel for those not already associated with the University.
Other systems we have promoted to the front page are the blogs and podcasts.
We had codenamed the project 'Panda', a nod to Apple's big cat codenames for OS X. Of course, being a university we felt a big cat was not really inappropriate, we went for something a little slower...
And after the launch the team partook of some of these fine beverages, courtesy of the jokers at Marketing. Hic.