Redundant to Relevant: Re-Designing the Rowan Tech Site One Link At a Time

• Home
• The Course
• The Assignment
• The Final Product
• Our Rationale

Personal Pages:
• Jess Bloom
• Megan Esola
• Katherin Fitzpatrick
• Angel Perez
• Danielle Rabello
• Jennifer Riggitano

Contacts:
• Jess Bloom
• Megan Esola
• Katie Fitzpatrick
• Angel Perez
• Danielle Rabello
• Jennifer Riggitano

Our Rationale

As Goto and Cotler say, "Web redesign doesn't need to be that hard. All it takes is planning and organization." Our main goal of the redesign of the Rowan site was to pay attention to interaction conventions, vaporous content and empty hype, dense content, low-relevancy search listings, and most importantly eliminating the redundancy of the current Rowan Technology site.

We began by mapping out our future plans for the site by using Gliffy.com which was essential to organizing our thoughts, and making our thoughts tangible for the project. One of the most important conventions of web design is making sure that the usability is accessible to everyone, regardless of how technology savvy they may be. To ensure this, we made sure that a search bar is available on every page that is on the technology site.

To make the homepage easier to regress to, we added a link in the Rowan logo in both the header and footer that is standard on every page of our redesign. Anytime the user needs to go back to the homepage, they can simply click on the one in the header if they are towards the top of the page, or click on the one in the footer if they are reading towards the bottom of the page. A huge part of our society is acting instantaneously. Users don't want to have to scroll up a whole page to go back to the homepage, or worse have to re-type the URL in to access the homepage, so the logos really help to eliminate most frustration.

In addition to the Rowan logos, we have implemented links that are clearly labeled and easy to find while scanning over the page. We have also added a right navigation bar and a left navigation bar, both which are standard on each page to assist the user in what information they are trying to locate. Our group has also added multiple points of contact throughout the technology site so if a user is having trouble they can easily contact Tech support via email or telephone. This contact information is also standard throughout each page of the site.

On each page, the content was changed drastically. It was reformatted to eliminate redundancy and useless information. The vocabulary was changed to get the points across more easily and now when the user clicks on a link it goes to the correct page, unlike the former Rowan site.

Overall, our group made the redesign visually more appealing to the user, and it contains friendlier, more welcoming images on each page. The redesign matches the current Rowan site in color scheme as well as a similar layout, making an overall uniformed website. The new technology site actually looks like it is part of Rowan University. Our main goal was to make the site accessible to any user whether it be someone who has more experience with technology, or accessible to people who may not be as knowledgeable about navigating through websites. We also wanted to make it visually appealing, and our redesign encompasses both goals; it was definitely a success.