Two days ago, I stumbled upon Illumination Magazine, Research at the University of Missouri, and found the website to be a wealth of inspiration.

Illumination is an bi-annual print and Web publication. What I find so inspiring is the level of art direction and interactivity the Missouri staff puts into each feature story. For example, I love the feature on Andy Warhol with its unique layout and interactive features.

Magazine + Blog = “Blogazine”

The emerging trend of blending blog post with magazine layout (as seen in Illumination) was labeled “blogazine” by SmashingMagazine in their post, “The death of the boring blog post?”

UK designer Gregory Wood further builds a similar case in his post “Editorial design with Expression Engine.” At a recent EE conference, Gregory showed historical examples from the print industry alongside Web designers re-inventing what it means to publish online.

What do you want to see?

As I follow and watch these trends, along with emerging markets such as tablets (iPad) and smart phones, I dream about Calvin’s online publications. Could the trends seen in Illumination Magazine make their way into Calvin’s Spark, an online-only President’s Report, or the next college viewbook?

Make it easy to find

The improved header provides consistent “global navigation” across the site and highlights three “site tools” (A-Z, Calendar, Maps) nested under the global search box. In the past, these global links were located in the footer. However, research revealed very few off-campus visitors saw these links or used them.

Graphically, the header’s layered appearance sets the global navigation to the background while elevating a department’s or program’s name into the foreground. The layered appearance connects the department’s name to its content in the body of the page. The background / foreground associations are subtle, and hopefully, will go unnoticed by visitors because “it just works.”

The new footer re-aligns Calvin’s template with several industry-wide best practices and serves as a gateway for inside audiences (students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents). Best practices recommend an organization provide:

• a physical address,
• contact information,
• copyright or legal notifications,
• and / or information for job seekers.

And in addition to these footer basics we also are providing links to our presences on various social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Kudos to the early adopters:

1. English (and Youth Writing Festival) - Chad Engbers
2. Sociology - Tess Lindholm
3. Social Work - Tess Lindholm
4. Biology - Pat Buist
5. Calvin Theatre Company - Camille Jones
6. Political Science - Joyce Steigenga
7. Chemistry - Jodi Cole
8. Ecosystem Preserve - Jeanette Henderson
9. International Development Studies - Susan Camp
10. Admissions - Erin Bryant
11. Music - Heather Rodgers
12. Gender Studies - Simona Goi
13. Classical Languages - Mark Williams
14. Travel - Jane Prins
15. Health Services - Nancy VerMerris
16. Religion - Laura Geelhoed
17. Congregational and Ministry Studies - Todd Cioffi
18. Spanish - Karen Miller
19. News and Stories
20. About Calvin
21. Academics
22. Community
23. A-Z Index
24. Resources
25. Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship - Dale Williams
26. History - Lisa Eary
27. Medieval Studies - Lisa Eary
28. Archaeology - Lisa Eary
29. Asian Studies - Lisa Eary
30. Dean of Research and Scholarship - Dawn Crook
31. Development
32. Information Technology - Nancy Zylstra
33. Enterprise Center - Michael Harris
34. Student Activities Office - Robert Vander Giessen-Reitsma
35. Career Development - Laurie Lemmen

We’re taking requests

To re-align an existing blue/green template takes about two minutes to complete. Please contact Allison Graff or Luke Robinson to coordinate your Web site’s upgrade; or, make a request in the comments below.

Share your feedback!

Please share what you think. Please include why something works (or doesn’t work). Knowing why helps us all make informed decisions. As more Web sites are updated, re-aligning the Calvin homepage becomes just matter of time. Stay tuned ;-)

So, what’s new?

Here’s a quick summary of what’s taken place with the Calvin.edu Web Project since early spring:

• The launch of Calvin’s new Google Mini Search Appliance (GSA). If you haven’t already kicked-the-tires, by all means please do! The search results now include:
  1. upcoming events
  2. building names and addresses
  3. phone directory information
  4. course descriptions
  5. and named scholarships
• A redesign of the People Search to improve readability and whitespace
• The A-Z Index now includes building, apartment, and residence hall names
• Consistent navigation between site tools (Search Calvin, A-Z Index, People, and Maps)

Kudos

A big "thank you" goes to Calvin international relations major Gabe Bell. Gabe optimized the Google Mini by modifying its front-end, pairing search terms with Web pages, defining related queries, and building five "OneBox Modules" to provide targeted search results (see above). If you see Gabe on-campus, please congratulate him on a job well done.

What’s next you ask?

Jonathan Laughlin is reviewing open-source content management systems; Allison Graff, Erin Bryant, and Joy’l Ver Heul are re-vamping top-level content, particularly in student life and admissions pages; and Luke tweaks the Calvin Web template and global navigation (take a peek).

And, there’s always spring cleaning =)

1. Remove
2. Reuse
3. Rewrite

Share your feedback!

Please, tell us what you think. Be sure to share why you like or dislike something. Knowing why helps us all make informed decisions.

A recent Google search of http://www.calvin.edu uncovered:

• 11,689 Web pages
• 6,750 documents (PDF and DOC)
• 36,800 photos (JPG)

The benefits of spring cleaning are obvious and numerous. Like a manicured lawn, a clean Web site:

• exposes new growth (better search results)
• performs better (simple navigation)
• appears more attractive (less clutter)
• reduces obstacles (broken links, outdated content)
• saves time (less maintenance)

This spring, I encourage you to start a checklist. Keep your checklists simple using the 3 R’s:

1. Remove
2. Reuse
3. Rewrite

With a little spring cleaning, you can make your “virtual” front lawn more enjoyable this summer. Need help? Please leave a comment or contact Allison or Luke in communications and marketing.

With this in mind, we’re updating Calvin’s search box located in the upper right-hand corner of our Web site. The visual change is minor, yet four Calvin search tools will be within easy reach across our Web site:

A live demonstration of this change is available at www.calvin.edu (a small, triangular icon toggles a list of helpful tools).

Stay tuned as more improvements are on their way as we strive to better serve our visitor’s goals and tasks.

A solid foundation

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the development of Calvin’s new information architecture (IA). Your participation in countless focus groups, surveys, fact finding missions, and one-on-ones provided the foundation for the road ahead. And like a good road atlas, this planning will benefit all our visitors. And we hope, add a sense of serendipity for those people exploring Calvin for the first time.

Calvin faculty, staff, and students may download the new information architecture plan using their KnightVision log-in.

• Calvin IA_V3 (PDF, 591KB)

The IA milestone is reached, but your feedback is warmly welcome. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below or contact .

For the last few weeks we (Matt Jeltema, Luke Robinson, Phil de Haan) have been perusing, discussing, pondering and debating the possible information architecture of Calvin’s Web site. There was a time when I could not have told you what an information architecture even was but now I am becoming quite familiar with the concept. And also quite convinced of its central importance in terms of not just what the Calvin Web site might eventually look like, but, more importantly, how a good information architecture will best serve both the users of Calvin’s site and the people who produce content for the site.

You can see Wikipedia for a definition of information architecture, but I’m not sure how much it will help you (it didn’t help me a whole lot). How I have come to define IA is by thinking of it simply as the way information is organized and found on our Web site. I remember when we began this process way back when that Todd Bennett of Dotmarketing said that if people need to know your org chart to navigate your Web site you’re probably not serving them very well. That stuck with me. That’s why when we began this project we started with research: focus groups, discussions with content contributors on campus, surveys of many, many audiences, a review of our competitors, an analysis of our Web site traffic for the last year or so—lots of data!

Now, we have used what we learned from all of that research to begin the process of bringing together the tons and tons of good content on our site with the things people say they are looking for. In many cases what people are looking for we already have. It’s just not been easy to find. Or it’s been in databases that don’t don’t allow the info to be easily found via our Web site. In other cases there are some things people would like that we provide in very rudimentary ways (an events calendar for example) and now we are considering how we can make some of those things better. Information architecture. :-)

As for the next steps on the IA part of the project, we’ve begun to circulate a draft of the proposed IA from Dotmarketing to various folks on campus and will be meeting with them soon to walk through the reasons for the recommendations. After that we will get the feedback back to Todd Bennett and then will come the wireframe process, another new thing I have learned a lot about in recent weeks! Stay tuned for more on that soon.

Phil de Haan, director
communications and marketing

P.S. Luke recommends Boxes and Arrows for good info on IA and more. :-)

UPDATE: Tuesday, December 6, 2011

J. Todd Bennett, of Miami-based Dotmarketing, will present the executive summary of Calvin’s Web Site Audience Research Study. Please join us at 3:30 p.m in the Commons Lecture Hall and learn what Todd discovered about us and his recommendations for our Web site. The research is based upon Dotmarketing’s interactions with:

• Over 100 faculty, staff, students and administrators interviews
• Over 3,000 prospective students, Calvin students, faculty, alumni, parents, and staff surveys
• Over 1.5 years of calvin.edu Web traffic
• Analysis of 5 peer sites

Don’t miss this open community forum. Get the inside scoop!

• What? Web Site Audience Research Study: Executive Summary
• When? Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 3:30 p.m.
• Where? Commons Annex Lecture Hall

• Stakeholder interviews with more than 100 faculty, staff, students and administrators
• Focus groups with current students, faculty and staff
• An expert competitive analysis of Calvin’s Web site and the Web sites of five other institutions
• On-line surveys resulting in more than 3,000 responses from five major Web audiences (prospective students, parents, current students/recent graduates, faculty/staff/emeriti, and alumni)
• A web analytics analysis of nearly 19 months of calvin.edu site traffic

Here are a few interesting tidbits we’ve learned so far:

• Having information easy to find is the most important factor to Web site success for our visitors, while having information that is current and well-written is also important
• The newer Calvin Web site template design receives high marks, but the inconsistency between different generations of design is a distraction
• Information from years past is a major distraction when using a site search engine, even if it’s useful to keep on the site
• KnightCite, a citation tool of the Hekman Library, is a huge hit with a worldwide audiences. This is a neat and unique asset
• Some audiences use the Calvin Web site much less than we would have hoped or predicted
• Calvin students still place a high value on face-to-face interaction especially when dealing with administrative offices
• Calvin people are great! We had the best survey response rates Dotmarketing has seen in years despite running the surveys in mid-summer

J. Todd Bennett of Dotmarketing will be visiting Calvin on October 1st to present findings in this project so far and to outline the next steps. Please join us at 3:30 p.m in the Commons Lecture Hall to hear more about the next steps in the Calvin.Edu project.

As always please contact if you have any questions or want more information.

We heard a few things loud and clear as a result of the surveys, including the fact that e-mail still is king. When asked whether you would subscribe to information as it’s posted on the Calvin Web site, here are the responses we got:

Here are a few ways you can stay up-to-date on happenings at Calvin:

• Subscribe to Calvin-Parents, a regular update of campus news, programs, events and other helpful information for parents.
• Subscribe to Calvin-Wire, a semi-monthly update on Calvin news and events for alumni.
• Stay informed on this project by subscribing to the RSS feed.

The surveys are done, but your feedback is still welcome. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them here or contact .

Matt Jeltema
On behalf of the Web project team