As students, faculty and others type depauw.edu into their web browsers on Dec. 16, a drastically different webpage will load.
After months of work and restructuring, the new university website, marked with visual changes including a photostream element, a virtual campus tour and a stark black header emblazoned in white with "DePauw," will go live after the last final of the semester concludes next Friday afternoon.
Jon Coffin, director of strategic communications, said his efforts working on the website are "beyond quantifiable" and have yielded a unique online product that represents the DePauw experience.
"This was designed for DePauw," Coffin said. "I think you would be hard-pressed to find another college website out there that looks like this one."
The site will cater primarily to prospective students and visitors unfamiliar with DePauw, but current constituents of the DePauw community were also considered in the reconstruction.
"It probably comes as no surprise that one of the core audiences building the website are the prospective students and the external world that might not be familiar with DePauw," Coffin said.
Vice President for Admission and Financial Aid Dan Meyer said the website caters principally to the prospective students and their family members. He said as far as current students are concerned, an "intra-website" should be programmed to include them.
"What we really need is an intra-website," Meyer said. "We're working on that, but it will not be that for the Dec. 16 deadline."
Coffin said the new site will provide easier direction with a universal navigation system allowing visitors on any page to navigate to important pages on the header and footer of the website.
The site also offers a student home page that provides the most-frequented pages on the site for DePauw students.
"Essentially, we've built it to be sort of a one stop shop for things that [current] students need to access on a regular basis," Coffin said.
As the website's opening day approaches, Coffin said the final details are being worked out as professors, organization leaders and others work to perfect their designated pages.
Chris Wells, vice president for communications and strategic initiatives, said the site will require the transfer of pages from the current site to the new one over the next 10 days, but he feels confident that it will get finished.
"The site looks great," Wells said. "The structure is all there, the trick is to put meat on the skeleton by transferring the content and creating new content."
Wells said the current site demonstrates DePauw in a way that appears unattractive to some visitors. He referred to the new site as more demonstrative of the DePauw experience as it provides more photographs of DePauw students engaging in daily activities.
"The old website in particular didn't do a great job of showing DePauw as the kind of student experience here," Wells said. "It was very hard to sell that as putting our best foot forward."
Coffin said the new photostream on the home page and various other pages on the website provide students with the opportunity to photograph themselves and friends and to upload them to be used on the website.
"I literally envision a student on Winter Term in Tanzania or wherever, they could shoot a photo of their friends and upload it to our site from where they are," Coffin said.
Coffin said that submitted photos will be monitored prior to publication on the site in order to prevent the publication of inappropriate photographs.
Another renovation to the site is a shift to a content management service that allows users to upload information, instead of having to continue to code the website.
"It kind of shifts the paradigm from, ‘Hey, we're worried about building our site,' and we can focus on, ‘Hey, what are we featuring on our site?'" Coffin said. "We can really make sure our site is really representing our department, our program, the experiences we provide, in whatever way that might be."