Last week, I launched the new website for the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at UC Irvine. We are the central IT department for the university. I have managed the website in most of its incarnations for more than 20 years.
The last major redesign was in 2013. At that time, we started using WordPress as our content management system. It was a big improvement at the time, but the design and site architecture had grown stale.
The thing about websites, is that they are a living organism. They change, grow, and evolve. We had many staff who had editing rights over the years and because of that the content had drifted and become confusing. It was time to take a fresh look and see what was working and what needed to change.
We formed an advisory committee of people on campus who actually use the site. The site is for them after all. We found that the only thing they care about are the services we offer. So, we focused on the services and created standard service pages where it would be easy to find information quickly. We moved our help documentation over to a knowledge base hosted in ServiceNow.
The challenge going forward will be to not let the site drift again. That will mean keeping a tighter control on who can edit the content and making sure they understand usability and accessibility. We need to keep the focus on the clients.
Take a look at the new website. I hope you find it useful.
Feedback on the new site
It is amazing! So easy to find everything!
SK
Congratulations on the launch! The website looks incredibly beautiful.
Hats off to the entire team who worked on the project, I can only imagine how much time and energy it took to build!
CY
I love the new website! Beautiful, simplistic, and refreshing.
KA
Just want to say the new OIT web site looks great and easy to navigate. I use that web site regularly to find info about latest OIT services and technical instructions, along with what systems are currently experiencing outages. The Planned Maintenance calendar is also very informative and easy to view.
SLH
Your new website is beautiful, clean, succinct, and most important – easy to navigate!! As an Admissions counselor, that works with students who are far away from California, I really appreciate you carving out an audience space for applicants – not only does it show how friendly and helpful UCI strives to be, but I’m sure it will cut down on messages coming to all of our inboxes. Thank you for the time, dedication and hard work that goes into all the things you do every day; and thank you today, especially, for your project manager(s) who lead the redesign!
AHY
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