Today we are thrilled to launch a brand-new website for the college at www.trincoll.edu. This project is the culmination of nearly a year of collaborative and strategic work between the Office of Communications and Information Services, together with our interactive agency, Fastspot, and our broad campus advisory group.
The website is the digital front door of the college, and while there have been some design and functionality updates to the website over the years, this is the site’s first fundamental overhaul since 2011. We have completely reengineered the site to create a new design, content strategy, and an information experience that prioritizes storytelling and strategic wayfinding.
Here are some highlights of the new site design:
Mobile-first experience: Not only did we set out to create a mobile-friendly website, but we understood that some of our users may only ever experience the website on a mobile device. All of the content is right-sized for mobile devices without losing critical information.
Easier-to-read and more accessible to all users: We know that the previous website wasn’t always easy to read. We heard from users that the small, low-contrast fonts made the previous site difficult to read. This design employs larger, modern fonts and high-contrast readability. In building the site, accessibility for all users was a high priority, and we built the site to conform to The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA standards. This means that we have used a stable, referenceable technical standard for building the website, and we will continue to test for and improve the site’s accessibility using these guiding principles. If we have missed the mark, though, we want to know about it so we can make it right.
Relatable content that allows more voices from our community to be heard: From the moment you land on the homepage, you’ll find stories about students, alumni, faculty, and the places and pride moments that make us who we are as a community.
A brand-new public events calendar: With the launch of the site comes the launch of https://events.trincoll.edu. Here you’ll find events from the new calendar feeding into the website’s homepage, and as more events when the academic year gets underway, we’ll add more targeted feeds throughout the website.
Some things to know about the launch:
This is a phased launch. Not all sites have moved over to the new design. As we outlined early on, many sections of the website are still in the SharePoint CMS. This allows the Office of Communications to work closely with site owners to shape their content to be as successful as possible in the new design. While users will encounter sites in SharePoint quite quickly once they leave the site’s homepage, we have worked to ensure that the information experience is seamless. If you spot any places where it isn’t, please let us know.
Site search is improving. We are using Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) as the site’s search engine. While this is a powerful tool for site search, you may see ads come at the top of your search results. This is not ideal and was not our intention. We are working with Google to change our CSE to be ad-free. Additionally, as Google crawls and indexes our new site, you will see your search results continue to improve. The full crawl should take a few weeks.
We need your help. As you navigate through the site, we want to hear from you if you have trouble using the site, spot errors, or have any feedback for us on how we can improve the site. Please be in touch and we’ll work to make it right.
Today’s launch is the beginning. More sites are already in the process of migrating to the new design, and we’ll be working with site owners throughout the year to migrate their content into the new site, train users on how to manage their new WordPress sites, and help event managers learn how to use the new events calendar.
Photo by Andreas Weiland on Unsplash