Chapman Family,

Thanks so much for your feedback on our new homepage.  REMEMBER: the rest of the site won’t arrive until the Spring of 2012.  However, we are excited to announce that our homepage has been updated with your thoughts in mind.  Now, please provide feedback on the new (live) homepage!

Global Screen Shot of new website

Some of the design feedback we received is highlighted below, and all of the design feedback (and SMC response) is posted for your review.  I’m happy to report that the overwhelming majority of the comments were positive – and even the less positive comments were constructive and in many cases helped us improve the overall design.  For example, we updated photography and brought in more of the “Chapman red” by using photos of Chapman students and friends who are wearing Chapman colors.  We’ll continue to tweak and improve the homepage in the coming months, so please keep your comments and suggestions coming.

________

I personally think the new design is great. I currently go to UCI and have a hard time believing that a large school like UCI is years behind Chapman with the navigation and functionality of their website. The site is clean and looks intuitive. I appreciate the ability to integrate social calls to action on the bottom of the pages, allowing the website to generate leads for prospective students and helping current student become brand spokesmen without doing much. Great design. I just hope the design helps capture what makes Chapman unique compared to say Concordia, Vanguard, or other local private schools.

-Visitor/Future Student 

The format and interactive feel are excellent. Very impressive.

-Visitor/Future Student

Thank you SO much for re-designing the homepage! To be honest, I’ve been having problems with navigating the site due to its presently mediocre design, but the new version looks AMAZING. This version is more pleasing to the eye,  and it looks like the links will be much easier to find.

-Student

The new visual design is much more modern and representative of Chapman’s strong arts presence. I appreciate the change of background color to white, which feels more energetic and fresh, less static.  I think the use of Chapman’s famous graphic (window design) as the wallpaper is smart.  The grey drop down that you can hover over are easy on the eye (as grey usually is) and is more informative than clicking on the heading as you have to now.   I notice however the different tones of red in the font.  Is this intentional? I prefer the less bright red.

Staff, Visitor/Future Student

As current a web designer for a TV station in San Diego (www.sdcoe.tv) I think the new site is by far better than the current design. I love the full slider idea. The “call to actions” are stated simply and invite the users to explore the recent slider items. People love pictures, and great pictures of real people who do stuff here on campus is what they want to see. The hompage design is simple and clean topped with a nice global nav. A nice rounded-corner drop-down would be good. The slider must be nice and crisp, built with JQuery perhaps. Good use of colors to separate different sections. All in all, a great step up from current webpage design. Hopefully a redesign of webadvisor and blackboard will follow suit.

-Student

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Thanks to all of you who left feedback.  Again, feel free to read the un-edited feedback.  Names and email addresses were removed for privacy reasons.

-David May
(on behalf of the Web Core Team)