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Whitman College

Summer 1997

http://www.whitman.edu/

Note: I'm trying to locate a copy of the old screenshot after my hosting company went under. Please bear with me. - 4.6.03

My first summer at Whitman College, I was put on a three-person team in charge of giving the existing site a massive facelift. The old site was entirely frames based, and while it probably fit better with the college's print materials, the general consensus was that it looked very outdated.

Again, little direction was initially given to us (I should note that I was the lead designer on this project, although all three of us worked on all aspects of the site at one point or another).

An additional factor behind the development of this site was our desire, as students, to make the site more useful to the student body.

Skills, Technologies, Etc.

HTML, Javascript, Lots of Perl/CGI

My Role:

Lead Designer, Developer

Results:

Thankfully, the client was more or less pleased with some of the initial creative direction, so with minor alterations, we were able to spend most of our time on the technical aspects of the site.

The competing target audiences for the site led to the development of a self-identification feature on the home page, allowing users to customize content/navigation. I still think we could have very easily rolled a students-only intranet into the general site and avoided the segmentation, but the client was extremely excited by the prospect of customization, so we stuck with it.

The previous site was difficult to navigate, so we spent a great deal of time planning the information architecture of this site (although the term itself was unused at the time) to make it easy to find things.

A simple content management system for the display of current events was also developed by our team to improve the site's usefulness as a campus resource.

One problem that persists on this site was the unwillingness of some department heads to reformat (or permit us to reformat) their own departmental sites. The end result is a site that is consistent until you get two or three levels deep, at which point everything looks wildly different. Development and adherence to certain standards is something that the college has been reluctant to impose on the departments, so it will probably continue to be this way, to the detriment of overall usability.

Shortly before I graduated, the site was redesigned again. Based mostly on client tastes, the new and current design is, I believe, a step backwards in terms of a professional look and feel, as well as ease of navigation. I had submitted a competing proposal for this redesign, but it never got past initial stages. And then I graduated.

Were circumstances different, I would love to be able to redesign this site for the college. There's a lot of good, usable stuff in there, but the current design makes it hard for students to use a lot of it, and doesn't project the marketing message that I think the college would like to have out there.