How can we make this web site most engaging? We’ve been asking that question a lot, and one clear answer is that the site must open a virtual door to this special place: It must show the faces and tell the stories of the people here.

To that end we’ve launched a new feature, “Meet a Deacon,” to introduce outstanding students, undergraduate and graduate. What are they studying? What are their goals? Why did they choose Wake Forest?

The site is kicking off with profiles of graduating seniors. We’ll be adding student profiles throughout the year. We invite you to Meet a Deacon and send comments our way.

Bold. Noble. Inquisitive. Resourceful. Intimate. Accomplished.

Where did those words on the new home page come from, and what is their significance? 

The short answer is that they came from the hearts and minds of people who hold Wake Forest dear: students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, supporters, friends and fans.

The longer answer is that they evolved out of an extensive process in which the University reviewed its identity—what Wake Forest stands for as an institution, what makes it distinctive in the world of academe, and how to best communicate these values and attributes to those who love Wake Forest, as well as to those just learning about us.

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One of the changes made in this design was to start moving toward better portals for some of our audiences.

One of those was to migrate away from the old Campus Life page to the term Students for now (pending feedback). Our hope there is to build a robust student-oriented portal, that can both be used by current students as a resource and looked at by prospective students to see what’s going on at WFU.

What you see now on that page is similar to what you saw on the Campus Life page — a bunch of links. We plan to expand that page significantly to make clear areas for Students to be able to get to what they need: RL&H, Dining, financial services, academic resources, things to do, etc.

We plan to do the same with the Faculty/Staff portal as well. We know at this point, we’re probably missing a variety of useful stuff that should be on there, so please let us know if you have ideas for what would help you.

Something interesting happened on Tuesday: Both the Wake Forest main site and the sports site launched redesigns. It was pure coincidence.

The sports site is run by CSTV (part of CBS Sports), in partnership with WFU. Prior to the dot-com boom, the college sports market was fragmented, but after the boom, CSTV came to dominate the market. It now handles the sports sites for about 215 universities.

The main site is handled in-house with a dedicated staff of three web people, plus a photographer and a writing team of three who also handle the WFU magazine, admissions publications and other print items. While the web team works with athletics on specific projects, we don’t work together on a regular basis.

We joked in the office that if we had sat down and tried to plan launching on the same day, we couldn’t have pulled it off. So this was just an interesting coincidence.

The challenge now is to take what was produced on a short deadline and make it an ongoing process.

We plan to gather feedback, tweak design and code, launch new pages and add new stories, photos and functionality. In short, we have to evolve to consistently reflect the University’s people and programs, supporting the concept of the Collegiate University.

How do we get there? The list is long, but the starting point is obvious: We will start by again reaching out across the campus to keep others involved. As we do, we’ll be focused on firming up the new design and searching for a content-management system. At some point, those will come together as templates and tools to be shared across the University.

This is a small step forward on a long road of improvement. We hope it’s a fun and productive trip.

So what is this new site that you’re looking at? For now, we’re calling this a “temporary” redesign. Its job was to meet the short-term goals given to the Web Services team by Mark Petersen, the VP of University Advancement: improve the look and feel of the site’s top tier of pages and reflect the school’s brand and values in about 30 days.

In addition, the site should start moving toward representing the entire University, as opposed to being focused on the undergraduate experience. Wake Forest’s strategic plan says that as a leading collegiate university, this should be “a place where undergraduate liberal arts curricula and graduate and professional school programs are mutually enriched by collaboration and mentoring.” The Web site should reflect that.

We hope we’ve met those short-term goals. Please feel free to drop us whatever comments you have either here or through the Contact Us page on the site.

Is this redesign “fully baked?”

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Although this project is all about looking forward, it’s probably helpful to look backward first. Here’s a quick version of the recent history of the efforts to refresh the WFU Web site.

The University intentionally put a hold on major Web redesign efforts while it went through a process to refine its visual identity. As that project came to a close at the end of 2007 and began to be implemented in early 2008, rebuilding the Web site with those new standards in mind became a high priority.

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