Spring semester 2012 promises to be a wonderful and exciting time here at ECU. We are pleased to announce that our new website will officially launch on January 23! We hope that everyone has enjoyed learning more about the redesign through this blog and through the beta website, which launched in September. Our web designers and developers have been hard at work these past few months gathering user feedback. Our goal is the build the best version of ecu.edu that we possibly can.

Some of the highlighted features of the new website include a wider page, expanded content, the MyLinks tool, and greater accessibility.

While the current site has a page width of 770 pixels, the new site will increase to 960 pixels. Moving to a wider page will give visitors to the site a more pleasant and readable experience. Photos will be larger, font sizes will increase, and there will be more space between the various elements on the page so the content will not be so crowded. This width will also easily accommodate a variety of page layouts on the Web, including a two, three, or four column layout, depending on the amount of content on the page.

The new ecu.edu will also offer more content that is easier to follow and consume. The site will focus on delivering the information that people need in a variety of ways. New technology has enabled us to do so much via the Web. We can watch television, listen to music, form communities, and connect with each other. ECU strives to use this new technology to produce more expansive content such as interactive features, podcast series, photo galleries, digital publications, and mobile apps. Our mission it to tell the story of the university and provide information and services to the campus community and the many users who visit ecu.edu.

MyLinks is an exciting new feature that will also be available on the university’s new site. This tool will be a way for anyone with a PirateID to organize the various websites and online tools they use here at ECU.

With MyLinks, members of the Pirate community can be anywhere on any site in the ecu.edu domain and in one click have access to their ECU bookmarks. Students, faculty, and staff will be able to add and delete links and share their links with friends by e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

There will be a set of default links in the MyLinks feature that includes e-mail, BlackBoard, OneStop, and a few others. Members of the Pirate community will also have the option to set and organize additional ECU links that are important to them.

Finally, the new ecu.edu strives to be accessible to everyone. By adhering to guidelines and standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ECU web developers ensure that the new website will be accessible. The redesign will utilize a div-based layout instead of tables. Headings will be marked up with appropriate “H” tags. Using CSS for the visual layout of the site will keep the presentation and underlying structure separate. Text equivalents for visual content, well-organized navigation mechanisms, consideration for visitors with color blindness, and many other accessibility best practices will be implemented in the new design.

ECU’s website has grown immensely over the past few years. Today there are more than 110,000 web pages in the ecu.edu domain, and those pages are visited by millions of people each year. With these improvements, the new site will be even more invaluable as a resource to everyone associated with East Carolina.

To ensure that all visitors to ecu.edu have access to the site’s content and that the site is compliant with state and federal laws, the redesign is being developed from the ground up with accessibility in mind.

Why design for accessibility? The ECU website serves a diverse community of people. Many of these people may have disabilities that affect their ability to see, hear, move or process some types of information. In some cases, assistive technologies help people with disabilities operate computers and navigate the web. A blind user may use screen reading software and key presses to read and navigate a website. A person with limited mobility can use voice recognition software to manipulate a PC when using a keyboard and mouse is difficult or impossible. An accessible website avoids barriers between this technology and the site’s content and facilitates equal access to all visitors, disabled or not.

By adhering to guidelines and standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ECU web developers are ensuring that the new website will be accessible. The redesign will utilize a div-based layout instead of tables. Headings will be marked up with appropriate “H” tags. Using CSS for the visual layout of the site will keep the presentation and underlying structure separate. Text equivalents for visual content, well-organized navigation mechanisms, consideration for visitors with color blindness, and many other accessibility best practices will be implemented in the new design. To test the redesign’s accessibility, various procedures will be implemented ranging from automated evaluation tools to usability tests by individuals who utilize assistive technology.

ECU’s website has grown immensely over the past few years. With the promise of more content, the new site will be even more invaluable as a resource to everyone associated with the campus. The accessibility efforts of the web development team will ensure that this resource is available to all visitors of ecu.edu regardless of disability status.

More information on web accessibility – http://webaim.org/
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) – http://www.w3.org/WAI
Americans with Disabilities Act – http://www.ada.gov/
Section 508 – http://www.section508.gov/

Welcome back students, faculty, and staff! We hope everyone had a fantastic break. Over the summer, the Web Working Group has been diligently working to build a new website for the university, and a beta website of the redesign will launch in September. Work on the new website will continue through the fall semester in preparation for the official launch of the new website in January.

During the fall semester, a lot of work will also be done to create new templates that will take advantage of the redesign. These templates, designed in the university’s content management system CommonSpot, will be available to contributors and web developers across campus in January when the new website officially launches. The new templates will offer the user community a lot of advantages over the existing templates. They will be div-based templates, as opposed to table-based templates. The CSS that defines the look of the new templates will also be more streamlined and up-to-date with current web standards. This will allow for faster page loads and more design flexibility. These new templates will all be set at the new page width of 960 pixels. They will include new features like the MyLinks tool and will allow for better integration with the campus map, the campus directory, built-in page sharing, and better connections with social media platforms.

In addition, these new templates will take a different approach to what has been used in CommonSpot up until now. When users log in to create a new page or website in CommonSpot, they will be presented with a number of themes to pick from. The themes will have been designed to take advantage of the redesign. The themes will make it easier for people who may not have a strong background in web design to build pages. A lot of the design work will have already been done, and contributors will just need to fill in the content. For advanced users, a base template will be available and custom templates can be created from the base template.

The university realizes that this is a big change in the way we manage websites across campus. As you can imagine, with 80,000 webpages currently under the ECU domain, it will take a lot of time to make this shift. Therefore, the move to the new design will be encouraged, but it is by no means mandatory that departments and colleges redesign their websites to fit with the new design. However, we do think that with the new tools and the enhanced page design, most units on campus will be excited about taking advantage of what the new website has to offer.

ECU’s new website promises to deliver more content that is easier to follow and easier to consume. The new site will focus on delivering the information that people need in a variety of ways. No matter who you are, whether student, faculty, staff, alumnus, or a friend of the university, ECU will strive to give you the information and the stories you’ll find interesting.

ECU has diligently worked in the last few years to put news and creative teams behind creating content for the homepage of the university and for managing announcements and events. The Athletics Department also has a team that focuses on producing news and feature stories about Pirate sports.

Social media is another outlet that ECU will be utilizing to deliver information and content to the Pirate Nation. The university has developed and is in the process of developing several social media platforms—namely Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Not only does ECU have university-wide accounts for these social media sites, many departments and colleges within the university are maintaining their own accounts in order to better connect with their audience.

Internet technology enables us to do so much via the Web. We can watch television, listen to music, form communities, and connect with each other. ECU is using this new technology to produce more expansive content such as interactive features, podcast series, photo galleries, digital publications, and mobile apps. Our mission is to tell the story of the university and provide information and services to the campus community and the millions of visitors who visit ecu.edu.

Have you ever wanted to be able to easily go back and forth between your e-mail, Blackboard, OneStop, and all of the different tools you use at the university in your academic life?

Well, you are in luck! As part of the redesign efforts, ecu.edu will have a new feature called MyLinks. This tool will be a way for anyone with a PirateID to organize the various websites and online tools they use here at ECU.

With this new feature, members of the Pirate community can be anywhere on any site in the ecu.edu domain and in one click have access to their ECU bookmarks. Students, faculty, and staff will be able to add and delete links and share their links with friends by e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

There will be a set of default links in the MyLinks feature that includes e-mail, BlackBoard, OneStop, and a few others. Members of the Pirate community will also have the option to set and organize additional ECU links that are important to them.

Starting in the fall, with the launch of the beta site, students, faculty, and staff will begin to define their MyLinks and their information will be written to a database. The MyLinks information that they set in the fall will carry over to the launch of the redesign site in January of 2012.

MyLinks is just one of the ways that the redesign at ecu.edu will give users a new level of personalization.