Home Page Wireframe, Site Map, and Content Outline
Over the course of last month and half we’ve been hard at work on several fronts with the redesign project. First, we worked with BarkleyREI to finalize the information architecture (aka site map) for the college site. We also completed the site content outline, which is a more comprehensive outline of the site’s higher level pages with detailed notes.
Lastly, we completed work on the home page wireframe, a visual representation of the home page we finish before we begin any design work. The wireframe defines what will go on the home page, including primary, secondary, and tertiary navigation, footer, call outs, search box, news and calendar listings, and multimedia features. Over the course of this work we sought and received input from several offices and have appreciated their feedback.
Overcoming Silos
Early on in our redesign project when we were selecting a Web firm, we received feedback from several companies that our Web site information architecture was strong, but was very siloed. We spend a lot of time on our current Web site directing visitors to one department or another for Web information. The thing to keep in mind is that our Web visitors should not have to learn our organizational structure to find information about us. With this in mind, we spent a lot of time developing the site’s information architecture to have it be more topic based and building stronger landing pages for the site’s target audiences – current students, parents and families, alumni, businesses and community, and faculty and staff.
It’s important to note that the primary audience for the college Web site is prospective students, an external audience that is least familiar with the college’s organizational structure and an audience where topic-based navigation is a better approach.
Next Steps
With the home page wireframe, content outline, and site map now complete, we now move on to the next project priorities:
- Home page design concepts - BarkleyREI will present us with four design concepts for review
- Lower level wireframes – defining what will be included on all landing pages and major sites linked off the college home page
- Content migration tracker – a spreadsheet tracking all content that will be migrated from the current site to the new site
- Site application inventory - an inventory of all scripts, applications, and forms that will carry over to the new site and require development or template skinning
- Ingeniux application handling - Determine which applications and functionality will be handled within the Ingeniux CMS and those that will require custom development.
We also recently installed a new CMS export tool on our Web server that will allow us to easily export all current CMS content as plain text in a directory structure. Pages in the new CMS will be coded to XHTML Transitional, so much of the formating on our current site will be stripped out to remain complaint with the new document type.