Redesign mayhem
Aug 13th, 2007 by Karen
I haven’t been blogging much of late. Mostly because I’ve been engrossed in trying to get our site redesign done before the semester starts. My team is working really hard and today we pulled it all together to put the site live. However, there is still quite a bit of clean up work to be done; mostly on the pages that have been revised/reworked. These pages are the real pain because they have the most new code and rely on input/work from other people.
Being dependent on others drives me nuts when it comes to finishing a project on time. Mostly because no matter how many times you tell people what your drop-dead deadline is, they still don’t deliver stuff on time. How I deal with this is to do everything myself or my team is in complete control of first. Then I prioritize the stuff I need from other people into the must have this to go live, and would be nice to have to go live.
The “would be nice to haves” have been moved to the post-live list. We will work on finishing as many of these as we can over the next week. Some of these are squirrelly CSS issues, some of these are administration module code (content is in the database but there is no way for end-uses to edit it until we write this code), some is making pages prettier with pictures (still waiting for photos from campus marketing) and some of it is just configuring completely the federate search tool and OpenURL resolver.
All and all though I’m really happy with how the site turned out and the work my team did. I can’t wait to see how the next round of usability testing comes out. But that will have to wait until I clear the things off my desk that have been piling up during the push to get the site live.
Congratulations on your new site roll-out. It does look great! I am guessing red is the color for your University. :)
I’m also curious as to how you do your usability testing. It’s a hot issue for us, but so far we have handled testing in-house. I’m also curious about your layout — it looks like you didn’t worry about staying “above the fold”. Presumably, with a college-age audience, you have more sophisticated readers than we do.
We would typically do our usability testing in house but we had the campus web technologies group do the usability testing (mostly focus groups) for this redesign. As for staying above the fold, we tried to keep the things we thought were more important above the fold and have the rest bleed across the fold letting people know it is there but if they want to see the rest of it they have to scroll. However, things didn’t come out as we anticipated and we are working to correct some of that. For example, the header for the Libraries Spotlight section should be above the fold, as should the Header for the Hours section. Only time and another round of usability testing will tell how much of an improvement the redesign is.