For its first eight years, Cornell University's main web site was run out of a dreary basement office, with no budget and one part-time staff position. When a new, tech savvy president arrived on the scene, I was able to seize the opportunity to create a holistic, evolutionary redesign for the Cornell University web space.

Scope

• Short, hard-date timeline
• Top 100+ pages
• Create system for university's new identity online, including logo and layout
• Improve top level functions (navigation, identity, search, events)
• Produce the "missing pieces" e.g. a Students section, a comprehensive Academics section, etc.
• Significant visual improvement

Goals

• Improve Cornell community's perception of site
• Match CUWeb image to Cornell's image
• Make site's functional and navigational improvement top institutional priorities
• Satisfy needs of integral constituencies (Cornell administration, academic units, students, users, and web staff)
• Create community-wide developer network, and provide support for it
• Choose software solutions for site that could be leveraged by rest of community

Reach

• In 2004, Cornell ranked 1600 in Internet traffic (down from 500)
• Cornell Home > 1 million visits per month
• Front door to entire university community
• 300K+ stakeholders, including 7 deans, 25 execs, 60 trustees, 250,000 living alumni, 20,000 students, 3 newspapers

Challenges

• Extremely compact timeline
• Many new things
• Large scale content effort
• Community spread out and had little faith in delivery
• No clear hierarchy of stakeholders' stakes
• Simultaneous identity rework--two life events!

Strengths

• Strong exec support: president in waxing honeymoon phase
• Design and development team was my former team!
• Overall team was large enough and talented enough to achieve goals
• Intellectual community opinion was win-able
• Cornell community had built up dissatisfaction with former site

Low-hanging fruit

• Consolidate ownership of structure and promote specific ownership of content
• Vast navigation improvement
• Content ownership
• Improving the Cornell image online

Innovations

• Five year plan for growth and improvements
• Blog to transmit redesign information and collect community feedback
• Designer, developer network to support distributed nature of development
• Official distribution of content responsibilities
• cornell.edu = Cornell Web Space (university's online identity)
• Use of panoramic photos showcasing Cornell's beauty
• Solutions groups
• Scalable navigation
• Central Cornell search