College of Science website overhaul

Client: Purdue College of Science
Role: Designer and Developer

In January 2020, Purdue Marketing and Media unveiled a new audience-focused brand strategy. Every aspect of the brand changed, including the logo, colors, fonts, graphic elements, photography, and voice/tone. This change applied to every medium, including websites. In June, I began working with Jennifer Jeffries, the communications and media coordinator, on the College of Science website. We needed to develop a plan to remove outdated branding by August 17th.

We met on June 17 to discuss the scope, primary goals, priority sections, and design. We also talked about primary, secondary, and supporting page content. We met again on June 26 to discuss the content, which was organized into five sections:

1. About: College, Diversity, Administration, Alumni, Giving, Resources
2. Academics: Prospective Students, Undergraduate Students & Graduate Students
3. Student Experience: Career Development, Study Abroad, Learning Communities, and Student Success Programs
4. Research
5. Outreach

Our focus was on the first three sections, as that information needed to be reorganized to support the primary users. Updates to the site navigation and footer would be discussed later.

Throughout this project, I reviewed the site's analytics, referred to the Purdue brand strategy, and looked at other Purdue websites for inspiration. I used this information to design and build the primary and secondary page layouts. (The screenshot below uses a secondary page layout.)

As the project progressed, we realized the need for additional content and web pages. For example, the Prospective Students majors page in section 2 and the Diversity & Inclusion page in section 1. We also worked on major updates to section 3.

In late July, we shifted our focus to the homepage and primary pages. The bulk of the work had to be done by the end of July, as I needed time in August to put the content, images, and components onto the live website.

In early August, I met with Jennifer to review the site content. We also discussed possible homepage designs and made a checklist. I made the Science homepage on a development site and sent Jennifer my suggestions for the site navigation.

On the week of August 10, I met with Jennifer and we talked about additional content, the navigation changes, and when the site would go live. We also reviewed the checklist and confirmed that the right pages were being changed. Jennifer sent the Science administration an email asking them not to make changes until after the site launched.

I made the necessary changes and deployed the updated pages to the development site for a final review. After minor changes were made, the old pages were removed, and the website redirects put into place. The site was deployed live on August 13. This gave us several days to make additional modifications before the August 17 deadline. The College of Science website is now much more focused on its primary audience: the students.