What is this? / Meeting short-term goals
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?”
No, but it’s as baked as it possibly could be in a 30-day window.
While we didn’t have the benefit of time, we were lucky that we did have the benefit of a lot of thought and campus input over the last six months or so, plus a fresh strategic plan and visual identity. That gave us a lot more to work with than you would expect when taking on that assignment.
No one will pretend that this is perfect. We’ve got a long way to go in content, design, code and other areas. But the goal was to move the ball forward and be better than we were yesterday.
Now we have to remain in motion: continuing to make it “better than it was yesterday” every day as we morph toward something more “solid.”
