Redesign and development of five websites
Challenge
In October of 2010, Cornell University approached IE Design + Communications to redesign five of the university websites within an expedited time frame of six months in order to go live prior to admission notices being sent in March to prospective students.
The university-wide Undergraduate Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Employment, Admitted Students & Graduate School websites had grown organically overtime with confusing navigation and outdated graphics creating an unfocused and complicated user experience for accessing information pertinent to each site’s audience. The challenge was to redesign and develop the five websites so that they would clearly communicate with their intended audiences, bolster the university’s online presence and provide Cornell’s online staff with an intuitive CMS that will allow the sites to grow and evolve with minimal programming.
Strategy
A decade of experience working with other prestigious higher education clients enabled IE to quickly hone a new design direction for each of the five sites, which balanced the prestigious legacy of Cornell University with an intuitive and inviting online experience that clearly speaks to their audiences. The design for each site was developed within the Drupal CMS to provide the site administrators with a robust system that would allow the new sites to easily grow within the new information architecture of the sites. In order to meet the challenge of developing five new sites within the relatively short time frame of six months IE quickly established a development plan for each site and met with all stakeholders within the university to ensure all parties involved were working from the same roadmap with expedited milestones.
Results
IE designed the new sites and took them live within budget while meeting the originally scheduled six-month launch timeline. The different audiences of each site now find information organized within an intuitive interface and site administrators now have an easy to use and efficient content management system that will allow the site to adapt and grow in a structured manner for years to come. Also, as a result of redesigning the sites from the ground up utilizing today’s best technological practices, the sites are now many times more stable with the ability to handle even the most demanding usage, as is the case when admission notices are sent out to prospective students.
Undergraduate Admissions
Financial Aid
Student Employment
Admitted Students
Graduate School