Goals of Redesign of
University Home Page of
20 December 96
As Always
- The page is ADA
compliant. This means that the pages does not contain graphic-only data or
graphic-only navigation.
- The page is not browser specific.
About the New Layout
- It retains the major organization of the old page, to minimize confusion among users.
- It modernizes the look by making the page two columns.
- It creates a section (the left column) for information that changes
frequently, e.g., Search, News, and Events.
- It adds a Business Affairs section, which
Vice President Charles Franklin had asked for.
- It is consistent in design with second-level pages.
About the New Graphic
- It is smaller in physical dimensions so that more links fit on a user's
screen.
- It is smaller in disk size so that the page loads twice as quickly as
before. For example, over 14.4 modems, the old page loaded in 24.2 seconds,
while the new page loads in 13.0. (TELESYS dial-up users had complained about
the load time of the old page. Dial-up users comprise the largest group of
users of the University Web.)
- The graphic uses a more appropriate UT color scheme. (Some had complained
about the old color scheme.)
- The graphic doesn't include clickable text. (Server statistics show that
of the 170,000 visitors to the home page in a typical week, only 40 use the
clickable text.)
- The left graphic will be rotated regularly. The U Texas text at the top will remain. Only the image
at left will change, so as to display different images of campus. The graphic
will probably be changed weekly, beginning in mid January. Wonder what the
current image is? Click on it.
Review and Testing
- The design was reviewed and approved by design staff on TeamWeb and in Academic Computing.
- Last summer, an earlier and similar version of the design was distributed
to major campus publishers for comment. Reviews were favorable and many
comments were incorporated into the later design.
- The graphic was reviewed and approved by design staff on TeamWeb, in
Academic Computing, and by Steve Bittick of University Publications.
- The page has been tested in various versions of Netscape, Internet
Explorer, Lynx (a text-based browser), and the America Online browser. It has
been tested on Macs, Windows, UNIX, and Windows NT machines. We have discovered
only one minor problem with the graphic on America Online, which we hope to
fix.
