Redesign first in nearly 10 years, officials say
USC’s websites will get a full overhaul this semester for the first time in about a decade.
The redesign, which will apply to the university’s home page and the sites of its colleges and offices, will largely follow recent redesigns of USC’s print publications in the strain of the “No Limits” marketing campaign, said J.C. Huggins, the director of Web communications.
A new version of the home page will be introduced in April, Huggins said. Mock-ups of what it will look like are not available.
The first of the new sites, for the College of Nursing, rolled out in October. The next, for the School of Music, is more than halfway done, he said. The redesign project has been under way for more than a year, according to Luanne Lawrence, the vice president for communications.
Thereafter, USC’s releasing do-it-yourself guides for departments to update their pages.
“It is a fairly daunting project when you look at the number of pages we have,” Huggins said.
Their designs feature a gamecock-feather backdrop and links to information oriented to visitors from outside USC like alumni and prospective students, Huggins said. The bulk of university Web pages are intended for outside audiences, he said, but their content is rarely targeted to them.
And as they’ve analyzed data from the Nursing site, they’ve found that those visitors have been able to find information faster, he said.
Additionally, when they get on the new sites, Huggins hopes the consistent look will make USC’s Web pages appear more clearly associated with the university. Previously, they used inconsistent language, designs and logos.
“We recognize that not everyone comes in through the home page,” Huggins said. “A lot of people come in through search; they come in through the side door. And one thing that’s true today is (that) it may not be apparent that you’re on a University of South Carolina website if you do that.”
But the more fundamental change may be on the back end.
The sites will be centralized and operated on one content management system (CMS). Previously, Web pages have been managed on six or more systems, including one designed by University Technology Services, or they hadn’t been on a CMS at all, Huggins said.
USC is in the middle of a three-year contract with OmniUpdate Inc., a CMS that’s used widely by universities. In all, the contract will cost the university $134,000, according to Kevin Germann, the director of UTS’s project management office.
The new system will make it easier to make changes to sites across the board, Huggins said, instead of emailing the university’s various website managers with instructions and hoping they’ll be carried out.
Without a unified CMS, Huggins said, the disjointed aesthetics would return since updates would be implemented separately.
“Entropy would take hold, and we’d be right back where we are,” Huggins said.