MSU Promotes Web-Forward Thinking

Jeff — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:56:05 -0700

Last week I went to Michigan State University's WebDev Cafe with a few other GreenLiters. The Cafe is all about getting web-forward thinking in to the MSU community and promoting the university's web initiatives. As a recent MSU Telecommunications grad, I was excited to see that the event was being held in my old stomping grounds, the Comm Arts building.

One of the most interesting topics was the new design and branding of MSU.edu, the university's main website home page. Four years ago when the site was last redesigned, a big web trend was to have as many links as possible on any website's home page. Today, it's almost the opposite - you want to present a few clear link choices in order to not overwhelm the user.

Though not finished by any means, the new design concept has a clean navigation, lots of white space, a large branding photo, and links to social media. These are all great ideas that are in line with current web trends, and I really like their new focus on usability. I'm excited to see the final version of the new site, which will likely launch in the first half of 2010.

I also want to give a shout-out to our friends and business partners who presented: Adam Henige from Netvantage Marketing spoke about how Search Engine Optimization can improve your business, and Julielyn Gibbons from i3 Strategies discussed the impact of social media on the way we communicate.