With the support of our strategic partners at Stamats/Catchfire Media and the active participation of many stakeholders across the University, this fall the CI Web Refresh Core Team has made excellent progress.

Since September, the Core Team has led 11 group meetings with subject matter experts across the University, including faculty, staff and administrators in Academic Affairs, Admissions & Recruitment, Extended University, Student Affairs, Advancement, and the Office of the President. During these meetings, the team has reviewed proposed information architecture and navigation changes, and presented updated content models for review and feedback. In addition, members of the Core Team have presented project updates to the Web Refresh Advisory team and the campus IT Planning and Policy Committee. Members of the Core Team will continue to meet with campus organizations to help ensure unified implementation of our new web strategy throughout the next year.

The new information architecture (IA) has been developed based on this feedback, as well as the outcomes of strategic planning and research completed in cooperation with Stamats earlier this year. This IA facilitates access to information for all of our target audiences, while focusing on improving access to critical information of prospective students.

To accompany the updated IA, the CI team has been working to complete a content inventory for each of the nearly 200 key University web pages. Page goals, descriptions of content and interactivity, and calls to action are being defined for each page represented in the IA. In addition, Stamats has developed 30 pages of new content in conjunction with  our team and subject matter experts across the University to engage our web site visitors and to help tell the story of CI.  The CI team continues to meet with subject matter experts in each content area to provide opportunities for review and feedback of new and revised content, to ensure that campus organizations and services are represented accurately and appropriately.

Our talented CI web design team has been busy researching and testing technologies to improve the mobile user experience, and has begun developing initial prototypes of the new site structure and visual organization. During the fall semester, the CI team coordinated two usability tests with prospective students, and used the feedback to verify decisions about organization of our navigation. In spring 2013, we will partner with Stamats to complete further usability testing of our prototypes to ensure that the navigation and organization of our web site makes sense and is easy-to-use across a range of devices, including smartphones and tablets.

The Core Team continues to work closely with our partners at Stamats/Catchfire, meeting as a team on a weekly basis and individually throughout the week as needed to solve problems and answer questions. If you have any questions about this project, feel free to leave your comments here, or contact me at Peter Mosinskis via email at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu, or call 805-437-8587.

Finally, a huge thanks to all those who have contributed their time, thought and energy towards this project during 2012. This project wouldn't be possible without the vision and dedication of our team members and the ongoing support of our campus community and leadership.

On behalf of the Core Team, we wish you all the happiest and most relaxing of holidays, and we look forward to working with you to launch the updated CI web site in 2013.

As I mentioned in the previous post, building a web site is a lot like building a home.

The process first starts with identifying requirements. Requirements define what the end result will have (or won't have), and determine how much time and resources you can spend.

From there, a blueprint which incorporates the requirements is developed; it shows how the requirements come together, relate to one another, and provide a first look at how users will navigate the end result.

The CI Web Refresh Core Team and Stamats have wrapped up the requirements for the new CI site (as outlined in the executive summary shared in a previous post), and are now working on a new "blueprint". This process is formally known as information architecture (IA), and includes the following activities:

• defining what kinds of spaces are necessary on the updated site, based on the requirements outlined in our strategy; 
• determining the naming/labeling of the spaces;
• organizing the spaces and showing how they relate to one another; 
• visualizing how people will move through the spaces; and 
• confirming that the spaces and their labels make sense to their users.

This week, key stakeholders from Admissions & Recruitment, Alumni, Academic Affairs, University faculty, Extended University, and Student Affairs are meeting individually via conference call with our strategic partner Stamats as well as members of the Web Refresh Core team to review findings and recommendations for their respective areas.

During these meetings, we are reviewing institutional goals, project objectives, core assumptions and guiding principles for the project. In addition, we are outlining key priorities, time frames and next steps related to each group.

One important theme re-iterated throughout these meetings is that while we strive to improve communication to all visitors to the CI web site, the focus for this project is to improve communication to prospective students first and foremost. This is necessary to ensure that the limited resources available for this project are focused on addressing our institutional goals, as listed in the strategic brief executive summary, available in PDF format.

Speaking of focus, redesigning a web site is a lot like building a house: most of the time, you can't design or build a house on an unlimited budget with unlimited resources. You've got to work within your means and you've got to have a good plan. Fortunately, all of the research and strategy work we've done so far have given us a good plan.  In our next installment, we'll share how our team is starting to build the blueprint for the new CI web site.

The blog has been quiet, but only because we've been doing a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes in preparation for the next phase of our project, which will continue into fall 2012.

Our partners at Stamats came to campus on May 2 and 3 to meet with students, faculty, and other key campus stakeholders. During their visit, the Stamats team met with 46 students, faculty and staff to discuss their perceptions of the University and their needs and concerns about the CI web site.

Since their visit, the Core Team has been working closely with Stamats to review their findings and to refine the strategies and vision that will shape both this refresh project as well as the University's strategy for web communication for the next several years. The findings and recommendations have been documented in detail in a 73-page strategic brief.

We are very pleased to share a 5-page summary of the findings, in PDF format (219KB) (to view, download Adobe Acrobat Reader). The findings and corresponding recommendations affect so many areas of the University, so it's important that this new vision is shared, discussed and embraced by the University community.

We'd love to answer any questions you have regarding the vision, findings, and recommendations as described in the summary. Please post your questions or comments here, or email them to Peter Mosinskis at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu.

The Core Team is continuing to work with Stamats on scheduling for the next phase of the refresh process, during which Stamats, the Core Team and select stakeholders will work to review and develop an updated information architecture for the University web site. More about information architecture in our next post.

First, a big note of thanks to all of the vendors that participated in our evaluation and selection process. We appreciate the effort and detail that went into crafting the RFP responses.

I'm  happy to announce that the Web Refresh Core Team has completed the RFP evaluation and narrowed down the pool of vendors to three finalists (in no particular order):

• Happy Cog
• Stamats
• White Whale

Here's a quick update about our the status of our process:

The RFP closed in December as planned, and we received a number of detailed responses from the vendors we solicited. The Core Task Force has reviewed the RFPs and is following up with vendors for clarification of responses as necessary. Reference checks are also being scheduled.

Once complete, we will select a maximum of 4 vendor finalists to make a brief presentation to the Advisory Task Force, which consists of a larger set of key campus constituents. We anticipate announcing the finalists in the next few weeks, as well as the presentation dates and times.