Before and after images of the home page: the former site was built more than a decade ago
The new Columbia School of Journalism website has launched with its new look, and we are hoping that prospective and current students, faculty and alums will find it easy to navigate, more pleasant to the eyes, and, definitely a more contemporary offering than the previous one.
"Our former site was built more than a decade ago and served as a digital magazine with an attractive and frequently updated cover. But that model no longer reflects how or where our users get information. Most site visitors today arrive from links posted on social media and land directly on an internal webpage rather than on the homepage. With our audience increasingly on social media (mostly Facebook and Instagram), we must meet them there," commented Steve Coll, Dean of the School of Journalism.
As readers of the blog know, I am a Senior Adviser on News Design/Adjunct Professor at the School. It was in that capacity that Dean Coll and our Dean of Academic Affairs, Sheila Coronel, invited me to work with an internal team on reimagining the new website. Our Garcia Media for this project was David Ok, Columbia '15, who was a student in my Multiplatform Design & Storytelling class last year, and who served as my Teaching Assistant this past Spring semester.
Over the past 7 months we met regularly to go through the various phases of the rethinking process: briefing, sketching, prototyping and implementing.
Our aim was to make sure that the first encounter of prospective students with the website would provide a pleasant experience, with functionality to navigate through various areas of interest.
Making information easier to find was our top goal. The former site had 40,000 pages, which made it confusing and difficult to navigate. The new site has closer to 300 pages.