Solutions: content management, design/identity
Vertical: Education

Founded in 1873 by the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland was the first Catholic college for women to award the four–year baccalaureate degree. The beautiful campus environment situated in a residential area in the northern part of Baltimore, MD has a rich heritage as a women’s college. Today, the college educates a diverse population at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Women’s College, the Weekend College for working women and men, and the Graduate Studies program are the college’s principal offerings. Notre Dame needed a new Web site design in combination with a major information architecture overhaul. Visitors to the existing site had difficulty locating specific information, and the site did little to promote the institution to the intended primary audience of high school students in search of an institute of higher learning. Maintaining content on the site was also difficult and required content contributors to funnel content through a Webmaster to turn into HTML and link into the existing site.

Fig Leaf Software’s first task was to analyze the disorganized content of the existing Web site. The goal was to define an information architecture that would help visitors find the information they needed while showing them the Notre Dame’s rich history and offerings. As different as the individual colleges within Notre Dame are, they share a significant amount of college-wide information including courses, facilities and admissions information. The information architecture project consolidated the common information from a management standpoint and overhauled the site navigation to allow users to access the same information from different locations. The process to define the new architecture included interviewing a wide range of students, faculty and staff from each college to develop a detailed creative brief. Following the initial planning stages, Fig Leaf Software performed a two-phase deployment in order to meet the College’s aggressive timeline. The first deployment was a completely redesigned 400-page static HTML site. The second deployment was a transparent shift to the CommonSpot Content Server for dynamically managing the site content. The graphic redesign focused on addressing each of the site’s main audience groups by coupling the concise information architecture to graphic imagery selected to appeal to the various groups. The new design for the home page replaced static campus images with dynamic images of students and faculty along with quote callouts and timely campus news and events. “Quick Links” and “Frequent Destinations” drop-downs allow visitors quick access to detailed information with a single click.

The fresh imagery and new information architecture allow the site to work as an effective marketing tool for the college as well as a useful information resource for current students, faculty and staff. The updated information architecture ensures users can quickly find the specific information they are looking for, many times in a single click. For example, admissions information that was initially buried inside the Women’s College sub-site and is now accessible directly from the home page.