A phone call to Frank Biafora, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, highlighted a problem for USF St. Petersburg eight years in the making.
The parent of an incoming student was on the line, wondering how to get her new student signed up for a meal plan. At the time, USFSP did not have meal plans. Biafora shared that information with her, but she remained confused.
She was looking right at the meal plan on the website, she said.
Michel Fougeres, USFSP’s Strategic Web Developer & Project Leader, found that many students, faculty, community members and prospective students were confusing USFSP’s website with USF Tampa’s site when he was hired last April.
“What we learned is that the colors are so similar and the logo is so similar, and because some of the things you need to do during the admissions process go through the USF system, they had no idea,” Fougeres said.
Fougeres and his team of faculty, staff and students are seeking to remedy that issue—along with many others—by building a new, more user-friendly site for the school.
Starting sometime in March, those who visit usfsp.edu will be greeted with a bright new color scheme and playful new fonts, highlighting the school’s image as “the jewel by the bay.”
“We are proud to be a part of the USF system—we’re going to say that on the website. But in terms of a usability perspective, I think there’s a case to be made that the colors should not be exactly the same,” Fougeres said.
The front page will be populated by aggregated news and events from individual departments, a streamlined system of links and other things that visitors might find interesting, such as a letter to parents or a video created by a student.
Fougeres said that student involvement has been key to the website redesign. Several students were part of the website redesign work group, and students from the Program in Graphic Design worked to create a style for the site. Posts from student bloggers will be featured on the new website’s home page.
The new site will use WordPress and open-source software, saving money for the school and, because editing the site will now be Internet-based, making things much easier for faculty. The old website was cobbled together over more than eight years and was template-driven, meaning Fougeres had to help every time a department wanted to edit a page.
The front page and the top-level pages like admissions and information about the school will go live in March. Work on the main pages for each of the three colleges will begin over the summer, and individual department pages will follow after those are completed.
Sites specifically for use by current students—such as USF Learn, GEMS and OASIS—will remain unchanged until after work on the current site is complete.
“I’m excited,” Fougeres said. “…I want to make us all delighted when we go to that web page, to say, ‘this is us—we’ve captured that personality.’ ”
Image courtesy of Jason Mayry, Monica Estornell and Kristine Richardson.
