We’re helping future Loggers get to know us by making the information they need most easily accessible. Our global navigation and high-level content pages provide an easy-to-navigate way for prospective students and families to explore our history, mission, program and course offerings, and the student experience.
Current undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff members, parents and families, and local community members can find more detailed department, office, and program content through internally focused gateways.
One of the goals of the our work with the website is to focus on individual user groups' experiences. Historically, our website has housed more than 10,000 pages, almost all of which were available for various audiences to wade through trying to determine what was applicable to them. Prospective students paged through detailed information intended for current students or other internal audiences, and our current students, faculty, and staff sorted through a variety of information online for promotional purposes or geared toward internal audiences that they weren't a part of for nuggets of information that applied to them. To work toward improving those user experiences, we worked with our website design vendor to develop a primary experience oriented toward prospective and other external users groups, and less promotional, more functional gateways for our internal audiences to find the detailed information they needed access to on a daily basis.
In short, the global navigation of our site (About, Academics, Admission, Student Life, Athletics) is geared toward prospective students, and as such, contains a cultivated selection of high level promotional information of interest to that audience.
We worked closely with department representatives in many areas to make an initial determination of what content was of interest or applicable to prospective students versus our internal audiences. (Though we're aware refinements and adjustments will need to be made!)
To access the information you need on a regular basis, including your academic department page, details about housing and dining, and more, click on FOR YOU in the global navigation at the top of each page of the website and select your resource gateway. Each resource gateway—for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, families, and community members—contains curated links so you can jump straight to what you need.
You'll find links to gateways for several audience groups under the FOR YOU menu, including:
In recent years, we've spent a lot of time working our academic programs to develop and update a page format that helped our them highlight a variety of engaging information for easy access by prospective students. The promotional landing page for academic programs includes a variety of mechanisms for highlighting program-specific content, which may include:
We know the impact our faculty members have on the student experience, so an important part of the promotional academic program pages is dedicating space to introduce the program faculty. Short summary bios and headshot photos in the Meet the Faculty carousel help prospective students and families put faces to names and give a sense of the research interests, courses taught by, and subject matter expertise of our faculty. Longer bios, including educational background, links to personal websites, and more, can be found on faculty pages.
Need to update your info? Some information is pulled directly from the university database, but you may submit a request to the MarCom office with changes or corrections to your bio text or headshot.
Visual design elements allow us to show off our beautiful campus and highlight the students, faculty, and staff who make up our community. Programs and departments can showcase offerings and activities through carousel photo galleries, large embedded photos or videos, and featured quotes, giving visitors to our website the chance to dig deeper into academic programs, student research, events, and more.
Our website offers flexibility to add story and event content to your pages. This provides content editors with more tools to share related university news and announcements, featured faculty members or students, and special programs and activities, offering visitors a richer exploration of campus life.
The visual design of the site is intended to be institutionally branded and provide a plethora of layout options for use on the site. Layout options include:
In addition, the background of the site moves at a different rate than the foreground information, an effect called parallax that provides visual depth for the site. This as well as other subtle features like button animations gives the overall site a level of panache and polish.
The default calendar display shows a month's worth of events at a glance with the option to click into days with more events than fit in the calendar view. Sort events by main categories, such as "lectures," "sciences," and more, using the category buttons above the calendar.
The alternate display—list view—allows you to sort events by even more specialized categories, including "faculty," "student life," and "visual arts." List view is also the default view on mobile devices.
Additionally, featured events may be added to most page templates, sharing events more easily throughout the website and boosting visibility for upcoming campus activities.
Our events calendar has a variety of components, including a calendar and list view, general and program-specific categories to filter events through, ability to add events to your personal calendar or share through social media, and more. Any member of the Puget Sound community can submit an event for potential inclusion in the calendar using the link at the top of the calendar.
As noted above, these calendar events can easily be featured on any page in the site. The calendar is also MarCom's main source of event information for inclusion in other features like home page coverage, The Hatchet, and the Logger Lookout. So submit your events early!
If your management has asked you to become a website content editor for your department, you can take the video training (or refer back to these modules as needed) and the accompanying assessment. Please note that there may be a limit to how many people in one area we can provide access to.
If you have questions before you take the time to watch the training videos, please contact the Web Manager to confirm eligibility.