T-minus 14 days

UNC Asheville’s newly designed Web site is just two weeks away from launch.

With more than a hundred new pages, new content, vibrant new photos and a new navigation scheme, the goal of the redesign has been to capture the excitement and the unique character of the UNC Asheville community and share that excitement with millions of visitors who come to our university’s virtual front door.

For the next two weeks, the staffs in Information Technology Services, Communications and Admissions and others will continue to add content to “Phase One” of the new site, and conduct further testing in preparation for the go-live day - - Feb. 5.

In this first phase of the complete redesign, you’ll see a brand new home page, of course, but there’s a lot more under the hood. In addition to new server hardware and a new Content Management System to support the site, we’ve also developed new “gateway” pages for major areas of the site including “About,” “For Students,” “For Faculty and Staff,” “For the Community” and others.

The entire Admissions site has been redesigned with new photographs, new content and features that will allow prospective students to experience the campus, hear about the activities of current students, and even ask a current student what it’s like to attend UNC Asheville. Both on-campus and off-campus Web visitors will have many new opportunities to find news articles, features about campus life and listings of events. You can subscribe to news and events feeds via RSS and never miss out on upcoming activities.

The second phase of the project will continue throughout the Spring semester when we will be helping academic departments, centers and other offices migrate to the new templates and learn how to work with our new Content Management System. Yes, training classes will be offered to anyone who would like to use the CMS.

We know - - change is unsettling. It will take some time for us all to get used to the new organization, but we’ll making tweaks to the site based on your continued feedback. We are hopeful that the focus group testing of navigation schemes and efforts to follow best practices in the Web design field will have given us a better way to organize the site for ease of use.

As we have done throughout this project, we want your feedback, your ideas, your likes and your dislikes. It’s YOUR site after all, and we really appreciate your comments and ideas, which already have been incredibly useful.