Thank you!

A little over a year ago, the Division of University Relations, including Communications and Public Relations, Creative Services and University Marketing, got together with Technology Services’ Web Services group to start planning a fresh look with improved usability for Virginia Commonwealth University’s home page, www.vcu.edu, and its sub-levels. It needed to be a site that would best share the VCU experience with all of our audiences.

We wanted to reach as many people as possible and incorporate your ideas into the project from the very start. So last year we launched an online survey to gather comments and suggestions about the current VCU home page, and we received nearly 1,300 responses!

Thanks to everyone — students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends and supporters — for the great feedback!

The survey says ...

Analysis of the survey revealed important insights into how people perceive the current home page and the expectations they have of the new VCU Web site — with current students being the largest group to give feedback.

• Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed gave a “good” or “excellent” rating of the overall site design.
• The majority of people could find the information they needed.
• Adjectives used to describe the character of VCU did not match those selected to describe the home page.
• “Busy” was the most-cited adjective used to describe the home page among “write-in” comments.

With these results in hand, we set out to create a simpler home page that offers a truer picture of the university’s character while keeping the successful, familiar elements of the old site.

Expanding the scope

The team also took the opportunity to package some of VCU’s most heavily used sites into the home page redesign project:

• VCU in Pictures
• VCU News Center
• VCU Maps
• VCU Identity
• myVCU Portal

Next steps

It’s time once again to seek your input. In the following weeks, we will be posting links to screen grabs and a test site to this blog for you to view and send us your feedback.