Welcome to Concordia's redesigned website
Welcome to Concordia’s newly redesigned website, part of a major initiative to enhance the university’s web communications offerings that will take us one step closer to a full-fledged Web 2.0 site and position us to take full advantage of Web 3.0.
This major redesign also paves the way toward the implementation of a university-wide content management system that will automate the updating of content, as well as toward the overhaul of the MyConcordia portal—starting this summer with a new homepage—and increased social media and mobile efforts.
The content, look and feel and functionality are based on extensive analyses of other university websites, as well as the results of Google analytics, our own usability studies and those of leading experts.
The first phase of the redesign began on September 1, 2010, with the launch of the NOW news site and accompanying, weekly e-newsletters. Since then, we’ve been gathering your comments and ideas and applying the necessary changes to Concordia.ca.
In general, we received positive feedback about NOW, which included content and messaging, the large sliding banners, more white space that creates a cleaner look, the ability to share stories across social media platforms and the presence of more videos and audio.
That’s why we not only decided to model the new site’s look and feel after NOW but also to fully integrate this important news and event source into Concordia.ca as a top-level navigational menu item and generate automatic news feeds that can be found throughout the site’s right-hand column.
Central to the redesign were the re-shuffling and revamping of information and navigational categories. Besides NOW news & events, there are six, other, top-level navigation menu items with easy-to-understand taxonomy that are in line with common standards and best practices across universities. These top-level menu items each drill down to content and multimedia that is richer, more contextual and updated in real-time to better reflect the thriving culture and activities of our diverse university community.
In the next few months, we’ll keep working on creating a mobile version of Concordia.ca and launching mobile applications after taking our cues from other areas of the university, such as the John Molson School of Business, the libraries and facilities management.
On the social and multimedia fronts, we’ve launched the Concordia iTunes U account that will keep growing with the help of students and faculty members. We’ve also opened a Concordia Foursquare geo-locator account and I invite you to join us and check into campus hot spots with your handheld device.
The University Communications Services’ Web Communications group and I could not have pulled off a redesign of this magnitude without having consulted and worked in close collaboration with other members of the university community, including marketing communications, recruitment, student accounts, the office of research, graduate studies, current and prospective students who agreed to take our usability tests and many others. This project was a stellar example of teamwork and collegiality among some of the best and brightest minds. They truly deserve all the credit.
I’m excited about all these initiatives. I hope that Concordia.ca will inspire the same sense of pride and ownership in you as it does in me.
We’ll be actively soliciting input and contributions from all our users—through contests and other means— in an effort to become much more dynamic and interactive.
I urge you to take the time to navigate through the site and give us your feedback so can we keep making improvements that reflect your needs and interests.
In the meantime, below is a more detailed description about the changes we made.
Thank you and happy surfing!
Lucy Niro
Director, Web Communications
University Communication Services
Related links:
• Web 2.0
• Web 3.0