Website design revealed on campus
Hunter Wallace
News Editor
The new design for Hudson Valley’s website was officially unveiled during a town hall meeting last Tuesday.
Over the past four months, Hudson Valley’s Offices of Communications and Marketing and Information Technology Services have worked alongside with Boston-based company iFactory to develop a new website for the college.
“Now that we’ve got the design shown and approved, iFactory will be working on what they call ‘front-end HTML,’ which is scheduled to be delivered in July,” said Sandi Eyerman, web coordinator.
“We’re also working with Hannon Hill, who have a product called Cascade, which is a content management system, so we’re going to be doing a lot of work, in terms of seeing what is going to be moved, archived and deleted,” said Eyerman.
Main features of the new website include changes to navigation, search engine optimization and support for mobile devices.
“The new design gives us the opportunity to showcase student life and the facilities,” said Dennis Kennedy, executive director of communications and marketing. “It also provides a better way to organize content,” said Kennedy.
“In addition to being mobile-friendly and showcasing the college in its best light, the new design gives us the chance to streamline and improve navigation, and it also helps us improve our overall content organization, so that content is easier to locate and access,” said Eyerman.
Hudson Valley’s core team behind the new website design has participated in 19 weekly status call meetings, and the executive team has partaken in over 20 additional collaborative discussions with iFactory.
The groups have also reviewed 12 preliminary design schemes and surveyed students and employees on three design concepts.
“The website is truly the virtual face of the institution and we believe this is a very large and important project to work on,” said Eyerman.
Hudson Valley also intends to retain compatibility across older Internet browsers.
“The other thing that’s really important to us with this project is that we keep our website compliant with ADA compliancy issues and that people using older technology will still be able to access the information,” said Eyerman.
Campus faculty intend to maintain and amend the new website as the need arises.
“We view the site as a living, breathing document, and it is never truly complete,” said Eyerman. “We may go through an adjustment period, but we realize this will be a continuous process,” said Eyerman.
The new Hudson Valley website design is scheduled to release in early January 2018.