April 11 is the target date for implementing a refreshed design for the college website. The intranet will not change. Current users of the college’s web content management system have been notified.

A Little Background

First, the current design came to us through the hard work of Shoreline’s Visual Communications Technology faculty member Al Yates. Thank you Al for a design that has served us well for the last few years!

Second, you may recall that back in September, there were some “town hall” meetings about the new design. This work is the culmination of efforts by college staff, primarily the Web Workgroup, design and marketing firm iFactory, and the college’s web content management system vendor OmniUpdate.

Key Points

There are two striking differences between the current site and the new one:

1. responsive design
2. the homepage

“Responsive design” means the website will transform to fit whatever screen you are using to view it on. This will provide a unified, high-quality experience for visitors to our site regardless of how they come to it.

The homepage will be even more focused on serving prospective students. It is intended to help them more easily discover what they can do at Shoreline and how to get started. Much work remains to be done on that, but the new design is a good first step in that direction.

Implications

The college homepage currently acts as a place to put advertisements for campus events, specific classes and so forth. The new design will not act the same way. Instead, that type of information will be on Shoreline Today, which is emailed to students daily, and the college calendar. (Subscribe to the college calendar for a daily digest of all campus events and activities. Be sure to submit your events/activities to get them on the calendar.)

Click for a comparison of the old and new homepage designs:

Current Homepage

Future Homepage

The Bad News

While efforts are underway to minimize this, there will be a period of time after implementing the new design during which you may see pages with formatting that has gone awry. We will be combing through the site to clean up formatting as quickly as possible immediately following launch on April 11. If you find “broken” formatting a week or more later, please feel free to contact Sean Duke via sduke@shoreline.edu or at extension 6659.

The Good News

The new design will add several new visual features that content editors can use to make great webpages:

• stylized quotes for making a testimonial statement stand out
• stylized boxes with images for testimonials
• new types of image galleries and image sliders
• stylized way to show news headlines for program pages
• new type of contact info boxes
• pre-styled tables that will work on any device
• tabs within a page
• accordions within a page

and more…

See all the visual elements on one page by logging in using:
ID: shoreline
Password: shoreline123

–Submitted by Sean Duke