Last week, University of Nebraska Lincoln officially unveiled its spanking new website redesign. With this redesign, I humbly believe we now have one of the top web sites among all the other US academia institutions, aesthetically speaking, and also in terms of support for web standards, accessibility and usability guidelines.
Some people had asked me about the design and wanting to talk about it. Honestly, I don’t think I am the right person to discuss that with. You should all go bug him. But on a personal level, I like it a lot. Taking into consideration the problems/circumstances we had had during the entire process, I think Aaron managed to come out with a design that not only looks really good, but also plays well with everyone else’s mind. Yes, it deviated a bit from his original design, which, by the way is stunning, along the process but we really tried to fight and preserve as much of the original design identity as we can.
I can however, talk a little bit more about the codes. Some argued that the markup can be tighter and I agree. It is always a very challenging task to come out with a solid markup that works on 4 or 5 different layouts across multiple browsers. Add to the fact that we have to keep in sync with certain layout elements from previous design markup to ensure smooth transition, not to mention various content layout and a grid based design (see below), things can start to get pretty interesting.
Other than the usual bruahaha - it works in the latest version of all modern browsers, adhere to web standards, validates, resizable +- 2, graceful fallback for JavaScript treatment – I have several other interesting points to share:
- Painless web page conversion is one of the main focuses of this project. Brett Bieber, our lead software engineer, helped me a lot by guiding me trough the inner working of the dwt template we have in place. By coding the CSS/XHTML markup around the template, I think we made the page conversion from the old UNL template to the new one a fairly easy process. All a web owner needs to do is to replace the CSS files and click the ‘Update’ template button in their Dreamweaver. Everything else is pretty much taken care off. This is especially critical when you have thousands of web pages from many different departments to convert. And we can easily push out bug fixes and codes changes to all the template users without them having to do anything to apply the patches.
- Different set of layouts can be applied using the same markup by just changing the BODY id. Such set up has helped us a lot in terms of codes coherence and maintenance. But the downside is you might run into trouble with multiple CSS overwrites properties. It really takes a good documentation and stacking practice to keep me in check on which CSS attributes has precedence over the other.
- UNL is one of the early adopters of Adobe’s spry framework. It is a pretty solid library, albeit a bit heavy on the size. I really like the animation callback function and how the library handles associative arrays is a nice breakaway from the prototype library. We are going to have a lot of fun with this thing ;-).
- Although it might not be noticeable at first glance, this new design is actually a grid-based design. See here: Grid image!
A week after the launch, we are still working on page conversion and fixing bugs but everything is finally settling down. It’s been a long process and I am starting to see how the new design will helps shapes the university web presence in both the academia and recruitment fronts.
Finally, I just want to take this chance to thank my colleagues – Aaron Grauer (you can blame him if you don’t like the design), Brett Bieber and Ned Hummel (I can take all the blame for the CSS/XHTML but these two are more than willing to share the blame for the javascript codes), Aaron Coleman (blame him if you find spelling errors or broken links in one of the top level pages content), Bob - my boss (blame him if you don’t agree with just about anything ;P) and everyone in WDN.
Shameless plug: UNL has a very talented web team in place and we are very excited about some of the projects we are currently working on. Hopefully they will see more sunlight over the next few months. Stay tune!
