11/15/2012 — Welcome to what will likely be the final preview before we launch the redesigned website. We are hoping to replace the homepage and a small set of department and office sites with new versions by the end of this month. If you are interested in what we have left to do, have a look at our pre-launch road map.

Today, we invite you to revisit pages we have previewed before to see how they have evolved in the last couple months. We have received a lot of great feedback from the community and used it to inform many of the design and usability changes we’ve made.

We also present a complete example of an academic department site for the first time. Take a minute to explore the new tools and styles available.

A quick reminder before sharing the links: This is still very much a beta version of the site. It’s more interactive than it was at the time of previous announcements, but you are still likely to run into dead ends or pages that are not formatted correctly. Also, a mobile version of the new site is in progress but not ready for testing. That said, we still want your feedback and would be happy to receive reports of bugs or problems you encounter. Just fill out our short feedback form.

 What to see

The look of the homepage and the four new “landing pages” (Academics, Admission & Aid, Life on Campus, and Alumni & Families) has been refined and we made them smarter and more adaptable to a variety of screen sizes. If they looked “huge” to you in the past, they should seem more reasonable in scale now. Here is the homepage; links to the landing pages are at the top.

http://www.stage.williams.edu/

The new department template is a big departure from the current one. Please note that banner image at the top of the page can be customized by each department. Use the links in the sidebar to preview the many page variations available.

http://acad.stage.williams.edu/

Quick Links is a new navigation tool designed to let you create a customized list of your most used links. It’s available in upper right of the pages above. Hover over the Quick Links button to see what’s available by default. Click the ‘customize your quick links’ link to add, subtract and rearrange. We have cleaned up the editing interface and added over 100 links to Williams sites.

Site search and Williams directories/indexes have been updated and enhanced. Start at the A-Z Index and you can test the search box and other directories.

http://www.stage.williams.edu/a-z/

Thank you for your interest in the redesign process. Don’t hesitate to let us know what you think.