November 29, 2011

New OPB Website!

We’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front lately. Mainly due to our focus on redesigning the OPB website, which has just gone live!

In particular, we have:

• Created a new office directory that allows the user to search for staff by content area.
• Created multiple ways to identify or locate the content you are searching for, including OPB department homepages, quicklinks for popular destinations, topical top-bar navigation that seeks to direct users to popular content even if they are not familiar with UW/OPB terminology or departmental divides, and a search button specifically for OPB content.
• Added a homepage SlideDeck feature that highlights more recent content in a user friendly way.
• Created an automated blog feed on the homepage!

While the website will be a work in progress, we hope it represents a major step forward in terms of the user experience. Look out in the coming months for a great interactive data portal, as well as new interfaces for the BillTracker and for accessing current and historic tuition and fee rates.

Many thanks are owed to Creative Communications for their amazing work with us throughout this project! Their creativity and professionalism (not to mention patience with those of us who knew far too little about all things technical) has been invaluable. We look forward to continuing to work with them as we continue to build out the site!

Please contact us with any feedback, questions, or problems regarding this new website!