By Victor Dixon, Editor-in-Chief
Newman’s main website – newmanu.edu – underwent a noticeable overhaul earlier this month that resulted in upgrades to its performance, accessibility and navigation.
Daniel Murphy, Newman’s senior web developer, spearheaded the project with University Relations over the course of about eight months, he said, and he collaborated with a redesign committee that included representatives from many different university departments.
The platform that the website uses, Joomla, was about to cease support of the version of its program that Newman was using, Director of University Relations Clark Schafer said, and the department took the opportunity to jumpstart the first major revamp of the website’s design since 2019.
“The website redesign was needed to coincide with the platform's major release that includes many new features such as accessibility improvements, multi-language support, workflows and security updates, to name a few,” Murphy said.
Several new and optimized features that came with the redesign are intended to make the site easier to navigate and to populate it with better information.
“There is a revamped search function in the site,” Schafer said. “It is faster and includes a separate button for the faculty and staff look-up, along with a new design for faculty bios.”
There are also pages that did not exist on the site prior to the redesign, and existing pages have been updated with more information.
“The focus on the redesign is to bring attention to the university's main call to actions – apply, visit, and give – while the menu button displays most of the other navigational structure taken from the previous design,” Murphy said. “While this redesign launch has overcome its first big hurdle, many other sections of the site will see major improvements soon, such as the Giving and Academics sections.”
So far, Schafer said, the redesign is going over well.
“This is the beginning of what is to become a highly optimized university site,” he said. “While we wait for the dust to settle, we are already beginning to see major wins in our analytics goals for performance.”
PHOTO: Courtesy photo, Unsplash
