New Concordia website unveiled
August 5 marks the start of a new digital era for Concordia — and for close to 1 million monthly users of its public website.
The redesign of Concordia.ca is the initial phase in a revamp of the university’s online presence. By May 2014, more than 100 sites and 10,000 pages of information will be streamlined into a single, easily searchable public site.
The site will be broken down into several sections, five of which directly address distinct university audiences: prospective students; current students; parents; alumni and friends; and faculty and staff. Visitors will also find news and events sections that are searchable according to topic and audience.
“We expect that site visitors will be able to find the information they’re seeking much more easily,” says Lucy Niro, director of Web Communications. “For example, if students are looking for tutoring services, they won’t have to struggle to figure out which administrative or academic unit offers it, or comb through several disparate websites.
“Over the next year, this type of information will be packaged in, and accessible from, one place; pages that offer related information will also be linked to it.”
A different approach to digital communications
This new way of organizing and presenting information reflects a complete rethinking of Concordia’s online strategy.
Instead of breaking the information down into various administrative units, the project team and its university partners decided to design a website that caters to specific types of visitors and how they search for content.
“University Communications Services and Instructional and Information Technology Services, the project’s sponsors, have been working closely with about 750 internal stakeholders to ensure that their vision and functional requirements are captured,” says Niro, who also serves as project director.
Also coming soon is a robust search engine, and a responsive design that will optimize the site for tablets and smartphones.
With the foundations laid for this new approach, the next step will be to migrate hundreds of Concordia websites into Adobe CQ, the web content management system that is powering the redesign.
The launch and ongoing work are the result of the university’s Web Content Management System (WCMS) project, which kicked off last spring and is slated for completion in May 2014.
Watch video guides to the redesign and read information about the WCMS project.
Faculty and staff intranet
An intranet for the exclusive use of faculty and staff launched at the same time as the redesigned Concordia.ca.
This private site houses internal information and documentation to help facilitate work, teaching and research at the university. It also creates a digital platform for communities of thought, interest and practice.
“While the first iteration will not contain content from all academic and administrative areas because it will take some time to move all this information to Adobe CQ,” Niro says, “I feel we’ve established the building blocks of a one-stop shop for internal communications.”
Learn more about the changes to Concordia.ca. Tell us what you think by clicking on the feedback button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.