‘Web design’ CategoryPage 3

Homepage Featured in O’Reilly Book

While browsing for good books, I came across two that looked particularly interesting: Object-Oriented PHP and the recently updated Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Third Edition (AKA “the Polar Bear Book”). Little did we know that while Jerry was mindlessly thumbing through Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture he would find the […]

Gribly Gets New Feathers

Last week, we put live a slightly upgraded version of the Gribly with some extra color coding (among other features) that should help visitors parse information more quickly and efficiently. Finding a particular faculty member with the last name “Smith” among a sea of students, administrators, and support staff with the same surname should become […]

A College Calendar face-lift

The College Calendar is an important hub of information. It is the centralized source of all events at Gustavus. The calendar received a small but substantial face-lift yesterday to help improve its usability. Here is a rundown of the most important changes. Shorter, smarter URLs Similar to the effort to shorten many of our URLs […]

More Usable Contact Form

In celebration of World Usability Day we re-designed Technology Services’ contact form. How is this better? The new design divides the form into two logical sections to help visitors input their information as quickly as possible. It also sports a larger text box for visitors to type their concerns. Additionally, the form now will remember […]

A Classics face-lift

The Classics Department recently approached us about redesigning and updating their website. We fully understood that they were a small, but incredibly vibrant department, and we wanted this to be communicated without putting an added strain on time or resources. Back to basics We first examined the information they wanted to make accessible. We came […]

Wanna say something? You have 4 seconds.

New research shows that four seconds is the acceptable threshold for loading times on retail websites. This comes in light of similar recent research which suggests that visitors judge the quality of a website in a mere 50 milliseconds. So, if you want to say something on the web, you have no more than four […]

Gustavus Homepage Concept

Our homepage was one of the final pieces of the Gustavus Website that needed to be updated to the look-and-feel we introduced in December. We have been hard at work to create a concept that incorporates global trends, reflects our new design paradigms, addresses known information architecture issues, improves the accessibility and usability of the […]

Design and Readability

fadtastic has two great new articles up about design and readability. The first, Who to Design For? by Steven Teskey, discusses whether designs should focus on users or designers. He writes, “It all comes down to personal philosophy, but I’d like to possibly open some doors on this issue, that you might not have thought […]

New RSS XSLT

The Gustavus RSS feeds received a facelift today through the magic of XSLT. To improve usability, when visitors access an RSS feed they will now be presented with an informative page containing useful instructions on how to use RSS instead of merely the RSS source code. Additionally, to promote the adoptation and recognition of the […]

Athletics Redesign

Due to technical differences within the underlying architecture of the athletics website, we were unable to release the redesign around Christmas alongside of the rest of our redesign Christmas. However, we have been hard at work on bringing the aesthetic and functional changes of the template redesign to the athletics website. As of yesterday, the […]