We've done some tweaking, mostly to the pages for Prospective Students and for Alumni, and added a page for Parents and Families. All three of those were in response to initial and continuing feedback from the community and from the offices most directly responsible to those constituencies.

Of course, we continue to get feedback through the "Contact Dartmouth" email address; we're responding to those messages as appropriate and forwarding others also appropriate to other areas of the College. As you might imagine, most of the traffic at this time of year has to do with Admissions, but we're getting plenty of "suggest a link" type of messages, too.

All of this is to say that the Dartmouth Web site will continue to evolve based on the needs of our users. We believe in our original principle of "user-centered design," and will continue to develop the site based on that principle.

I'm also continually on the hunt for new, interesting and cool content to feature in the "Up Front" section of the home page; if you know of something that might fit the bill, whatever that might be -- a new Web page, audio, video, images, anything on the Dartmouth Web -- email me.

As always, thanks for all the great input we've gotten. The response has been tremendous, and we're looking forward to the continued development and evolution of the site.

-- Rick

After months of talking and reading and questioning and analyzing, we've finally turned our attention to the surface layer of the new web site. We've created a mockup for the home and second-level pages and are now looking for feedback.

“10 Tips on Writing the Living Web”

I’m starting to feel the muse …

Web Search Is About to Get More Social

After walking folks through our research process and findings and some of the basics of what we're envisioning as the navigation for the new site, we opened it up to conversation about the site. I offered that Dartmouth's Web site is a shared concern: it's not just what we think the site should be, but that everyone at the College has an interest in how Dartmouth is represented on the Web.

That said, there weren't any surprises (at least to me) in what folks wanted to talk about: how we get visitors to the site to content, how the search engine works, how the life of the College is highlighted on the site. We also ran an exercise on imaging: a series of "mood boards" showing a variety of images of the College that represent various aspects. Again, not surprisingly, folks prefer dynamic, energetic images of teaching, learning and living at Dartmouth. They were less enthusiastic about the more conservative, traditional campus beauty shots of flowers and architecture.

It was, we think, a good conversation. One that we're likely to repeat soon.

Martin's got some more formal notes; stay tuned for a posting on that. (Likely to come early in the week ... we're spending some time this weekend getting out from behind our computers and enjoying the spring.)

We (the HomeTeam) have completed the research phase of Dartmouth's home page redesign, and it looks like we're ready to head into the design phase. First and foremost, we want to thank all of the members of the Dartmouth community -- students, faculty, staff, alumni and parents -- who took part in our focus groups, our user testing, and our online survey. Your interest and your comments really form the foundation of our work, and for that we're grateful.

We've got some of the literature that we found useful in the research process posted on our HomeTeam Web page. Also posted is the results of our user survey, conducted in late February, and our research review highlights. Feel free to have a look and let us know what you think.

We'll also be posting the results of some of our other research, including our analysis of server logs, search engine logs, and the focus groups and user testing. That bit of housekeeping might take a little while, as we're focusing our energy on setting about to actually design the new page. So bear with us.

And stay tuned: soon we'll have some things to show and tell as we move through the various stages of the design phase. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Fasten your seatbelts ...