We want you to contribute to and use a BYU Web Theme that is being developed and tested.
Here’s why: In Fall 2015 the President’s Council funded an audit of BYU’s websites. The research was conducted by a consulting group that specializes in higher education. The audit reported that our web visitors see the many pages on the BYU.edu domain as a single “BYU Website,” and that they are frustrated when each page is drastically different. This requires students to re-learn site structure, making it harder to find the relevant information they seek. The people hit hardest by this are new and prospective students, who have a huge variety of things they need to do using our websites.
Here is one of the main recommendations from the audit:
Develop a strong unified brand with common design elements and navigation across all BYU websites as to make all sites feel they belong on the same 'digital campus.'
Participants in the BYU web community have come together to establish a consistent user experience across the domain and achieve the effect the audit recommended. Membership on this grassroots team is open (just leave a comment below if you want to join).
The design of the BYU Web Theme is modern and mobile-friendly. The navigation and site structure are based on best practices from user experience research. The colors, logos, and fonts follow BYU’s brand standards. The project is tested against web accessibility standards to make sites usable by visitors with disabilities. Adoption of this theme will provide visual consistency that helps visitors feel at home and find the information they need faster.
You can see what the theme looks like on admissions.byu.edu right now. Here are examples of the header, navigation, and footer.
Desktop header
Mobile header
Mobile Menu
Mobile footer
Desktop Header
Desktop Footer
Writer: Joe Hadfield, University Communications; Katria Lesser, Office of IT; Luke Rebarchik, Continuing Education; Aleni Rasmussen, Publications and Graphics; and Don Powell, Fine Arts and Communications.
