Web Site Redesign Blog

Public Identity Sneak Peek - Oct. 16th

Are you wondering what new language and visual elements will be making their way into the new Luther Seminary Web site design?

Following chapel this Friday, October 16th, come learn what the new Luther Seminary public identity, "Moved by the Promise," is all about!

Program highlights will include:

• Unveiling of the new public identity
• A special video message
• Presentation of prizes for "Moved by the Promise" photo contest winners
• A special closing celebration
• A celebratory, free lunch following the event for Luther Seminary faculty, staff and students

All Luther Seminary faculty, staff and students are invited to attend this event in the Chapel of the Incarnation!

Interviews and a Style Update

At this stage in our project, we are working on the following items:

• Gathering ideas an input from students, faculty, staff, alums and donors
• Implementing some small changes to our existing site to lay the groundwork for future development

Over the last few weeks, you may have been asked to be part of a focus group or interview session.  We're thankful for your input thus far!

Soon, we will launch a community-wide survey to gather input from everyone with ideas to share.  Look for this in the coming weeks.

You may have noticed that our www.luthersem.edu site looks a bit different these days.  The content is now centered on the page with a gray background.  This is *not* the extent of our re-design, but a small step we are taking in order to proceed with some underlying code development.

If you have any feedback on these initial style updates, please email jdudley@luthersem.edu.

Please feel free to contact any of us with comments.

-Jim Dudley

Welcome! So, why should I read this?

Welcome to your source for updates on Luther Seminary’s changing Web presence.

You may be asking yourself "Why should I pay attention now? Isn’t the Web always changing?"

Yes, but we will have a unique focus on re-shaping our public Web site the next few months as we work toward the following goals:

• We will apply our newly formed brand identity to the Web and other publications
• We will redesign the user experience and navigation on the site to make things easier to use

We want everyone to have a voice in this process.  We have also put together some key teams to help represent the community and work with the day-to-day details:

• Our core working team is led by Maria Thompson and includes Ted Wilder, Ryan Torma, Thad Dahlberg and me (Jim Dudley).  You can contact any of us with questions or comments along the way. 
• We also have a Web Stakeholders Group which includes a much deeper representation of departments and interests across campus.  It includes not only faculty and staff, but board members and students.  This group will be meeting several times before our launch in January.

Ryan will fill you in with a post about our overall process and schedule.

Maria will talk more about our brand in a later post and give you a chance to see some of the exciting elements developed during that process.

Look for future updates on our progress, summaries of our information-gathering stages and opportunities for you to share your thoughts.

- Jim Dudley

Website Redesign Process

As you may have heard, we are redesigning the Luther Seminary web site. In order to help you see what we’re up to, I’ll lay out our project process so far and where we are going.

Pre-Planning (March – July)
Earlier this year we gathered a core web team in consultation with many others to start the planning process for the redesign. During this time we drafted initial project goals and interviewed web strategy and development firms. After interviewing many excellent firms, we chose to work with Eaton Golden who will be helping us work through the following redesign process. Eaton Golden has helped us in past projects like www.workingpreacher.org and www. enterthebible.org and we are happy to be working with them again.

Phase 1: Strategic Planning (July – September)
During this phase we are working to identify the key issues and opportunities we have in our website redesign. We are conducting interviews, focus groups, and user research to clarify what our various constituents want and need to accomplish on our web site. From this data, we will develop our web site strategy.

Phase 2: Information Architecture & Content (September – October)
During this phase we will be developing the architectural blue prints for the new site as well as writing, re-writing, and editing the content for key areas of the web site.

Phase 3: Interface Design & Prototype (September – October)
This is the phase where the look and design of the pages takes shape. We will develop several concepts, test those concepts, and develop a prototype.

Phase 4: Usability Research & Refinements (October – November)
In this phase we will test the prototype with users and make refinements and improvements based on the user tests.

Phase 5: Templates & Standards (November – December)
Following the user tests we will develop the prototype into templates for use in the new site. We will also develop design and content standards to make sure our site is clear and consistent across all of our pages.

Phase 6: Construction (November – December)
This is the phase where we put the content into the new page templates and build a working web site.

Launch! (January)
We are planning for the new design to go live at Convocation. While we will go live with the new look and a lot of updated content, not everything we plan on updating on the site will be complete at this point. We will be doing a lot of work post-launch as well.

Continued Development (January and beyond)
Our site has an incredible amount of information. We will not be able to update and re-write all of the content before January. Following the initial launch we will continue to work through the site, making updates, improvements, and new features.

- Ryan Torma