We Have a Winner!

Almost 1,200 people responded to our recent online poll that asked faculty, staff, alumni, students and others to help us choose the best of two designs for the new UNC Asheville home page. The good news is there was a VERY clear preference and only 2.7 percent of the respondents didn’t like either design.

Almost 75 percent of respondents preferred a design called “Thinking Big.” That is clear validation that we’re on the right track with the design. Additional tweaks will be made to that design based on comments made by respondents and by members of the Web Advisory Committee who have been working on the project.

Here is the design that will move forward. It’s called “Thinking Big” because at UNC Asheville, we do just that.




In addition to the new look for the homepage, there will be new designs for the second-tier pages similar to the “Admissions” page mockup that reflects the same color scheme as the homepage.

Here is a sample of the new Admissions page,



Comments made by more than 500 people who took the preference test will help us make additional adjustments, especially for the header at the top of the page. An overwhelming number of people commented that they liked the inclusion of the mountain scenery on the header, but many also said only showing mountains did not fully describe our campus and the vibrant City of Asheville.

Therefore, we will be working on rotating headers that give a better sense of place. These multiple headers will rotate each time a user visits the page.

Here’s a brief summary of some of the themes that emerged from the preference testing:
• Respondents expressed a strong preference for blue as a predominate color, saying this connected to the university’s official color, and to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• 90 comments of the 555 received liked using the mountains on the page in some way.
• Many respondents commented that the second design seemed cluttered and was too generic. There were negative comments about the green and orange color palette of the second design called “Framework for Discovery”.
• Many positive comments on the large, rotating feature and photograph saying this allowed readers to see the many faces of the campus.
• There were positive comments about the readability of “Thinking Big” and its use of color and organization of links.

Next steps
Programming and copy creation for the new pages will begin right away, and there will be 10 new templates developed for various pages within the main site. These templates will be programmed in the new Content Management System (Drupal). A subcommittee will be working on a content strategy and on determining which sub-pages will be a part of the initial relaunch of the Web site scheduled for early January.

The Web Advisory Committee also is working with ITS to identify all staff who have Web authoring duties so that we can begin providing additional information on migrating copy to the new templates and learning how to work with the CMS (Drupal). There are plans for training to be offered to staff on using the templates and Drupal.