Information Technology (it.ubc.ca)

The newly redesigned website is scheduled to go live on Wednesday, November 29th.

I have good news and bad news regarding the website redesign.
The bad news is the site still isn’t quite ready, as we are still in the approval process, making sure that all is in readiness for the launch, which is scheduled for December.
The good news is that you get to read another blog post! Also, […]

With any big project, there’s always the chance that things don’t always go according to plan…and we’ve been delayed a little bit. We got all the principle work on the site completed on schedule, but there wasn’t enough time to get everything approved.

In the next little while, managers and service content experts from across the […]

Today marks the final post in the UBC IT Website Redesign blog. To mark the occasion, I’m going to take a quick look back at the entire process. I’ve based some of this post from the Web Style Guide, by Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton.
Website Definition and Planning
The first steps were to decide a) what […]

Most of the major aspects of the website redesign are now finished. The testing is complete, the layout has been decided upon, the design is nearly done, and almost all the content has been checked for grammar and accuracy.
There are still are a few things left, however. For example, all of our contact information needs […]

Some things age well, like a car, a guitar, or a nice block of cheese. Other things, like websites, don’t look so good the older they get. For better or for worse, the non-profit organization known as the Internet Archive has been indexing and storing old versions of websites for the past 10 years (since […]

The past couple of weeks we’ve been busy doing some usability testing on the layout of the new website. We’ve invited some students to browse a wireframe of our new website and try to complete tasks, such as “find out how to log in to the wireless network”, and “find out what the ResNet penalty […]

Ask Me is a popular feature of our website (it’s also used on the main UBC website, and the Student Services website). For those of you who haven’t tried it before, Ask Me is kind of like an upgrade to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page. Instead of searching a list for the question you […]

Think of your favourite website as a delicious cake that you can’t wait to eat. Mmm. Just like you need a recipe to make a cake, you need code to make a website (such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, Flash, etc). And just like there’s no way to eat a cake without baking it first, there’s […]

Back in the spring we ran an IT Website Feedback survey. Its purpose was to get a feel for what people liked and disliked about the current website, to ensure that any changes we made would be useful for our faithful audience.
Of all of the questions we asked, the following is probably the most important, […]