A new De Anza College website redesign will make navigation easier for students, said Marisa Spatafore, director of Marketing, Communication and Development at De Anza.

The college website (http://www.deanza.edu) will undergo changes, keeping the same information available to students, but presenting it in a manner that will better facilitate navigation to the desired pages.

“In terms of the front page, we presented the same content but in an improved manner,” said Spatafore, “a way that is easier to navigate for people to find what they want.”

The redesign will cohere with the look and feel of how the college was branded, with more vivid colors than the old website, and will make the website appear more cohesive, in terms of pages being better organized overall, she said.

Spatafore said the De Anza

Associated Student Body brought a list of items they would like incorporated into the new look, to represent the students, and she feels they addressed these in the redesign.

The college’s Marketing/Communications team, collaborating with the Web team, worked together on the redesign in two areas – content presentation and technical implementation.

Focus groups, mainly in classes here on campus, gave the marketing team the information they needed to ensure the redesign would be in line with what people wanted, while also providing a few interesting things not known.

Focus groups were held in Professor Beth Grobman’s mass communications classes, where students gave feedback detailing what they wanted to see on the front pages of the site, as well as what could be added. Some students said they would prefer to see more pictures of De Anza’s diverse architecture on the site. This led to including a multimedia slide presentation in the redesign.

People tend to object to change in general, Spatafore said. Expectation has to be that with any change, resistance will happen. But, modifications can be made as websites are fluid in design, she said.

Budget cuts and environmental impact factor into the redesign. A campus staple, the printed schedule, is no longer published. Instead, a new web flipbook schedule is available.

“The new website redesign should not cause an abrupt change, for new or current students,” Spatafore said. “Also, we wanted to make sure all things are working properly and that the tech people can test it all before we move ahead with the site launch.”