The Text-Only Version of this site is recommended for your browser.

Skip to Content

People/Web Search | Calendar | Emergency Info | A-Z Index | Webmail | Weather/News/Events/Search Wed., May 14, 2008
About the New Home Page University of Virginia

Introduction

The Web version of the University of Virginia Home Page begins its fourteenth year on April 14, 2007 (see History of U.Va. on the Web). The home page receives more than 3 million visitors per month. Now in its sixth redesign, the site has been streamlined to offer more information and links to key sites. The design includes several new features, including fly-out navigation on the home page, U.Va. News feeds, a more advanced database-driven site index, and expanded use of RSS. The site also incorporates a wider page dimension. Links on the top blue bar now include Webmail, Toolkit, ISIS, the Course Offering Directory (COD), and the University's Emergency/Critical Incident page. The site offers a new page for school kids with games, history, and programs for kids at U.Va. Please read more about the new features below.

User Survey Results

We received just under 2,000 survey responses in total -- 158 responses to the first survey and 1,825 responses to the second. Both surveys asked questions about usability, content, look and feel, and left spaces for open-ended comments. The Web Communications Office has made many changes based on user feedback, all shown in the posted version of the home page. Please see Survey Results and Responses showing changes enacted since the first draft of the Home Page was posted January 31, 2007. The final Home Page was posted at 7:30 p.m. on February 19, 2007.
  Home Page Screenshot


New Features

Fly-Out Navigation

Get to favorite sites directly from the Home Page. You no longer must go to a second-level page to get directly to many of U.Va.'s most popular Web sites. You can now access them directly from the new U.Va. Home Page's main navigation. Using CSS, sub-menus fly out to show the dozen or so most popular links for each of the secondary pages. This gives you one-click access to most of the information you need (there are now 136 pages that link directly from the U.Va. Home Page). The fly-out navigation has replaced the Quicklinks dropdown.

In addition to the left-hand navigation, the new Home Page links to audience groups in a "U.Va. For You" dropdown menu on the top right of the page. The special interest pages for Prospective Students, Alumni and Friends, and Families/Parents are entry portal pages with their own navigation schemes.

News on the Home Page

Headlines with the latest U.Va. news and events are now available directly on the Home Page. Using RSS feeds, the Home Page is updated every workday with the latest headlines from UVA Today and news of other important information and events. These news feeds replace the UVA TO GO feeds featured at the bottom of the current Home Page.  You can also access all UVA TO GO RSS feeds from the Things To Do/News page.

Expanded For U.Va. Students

The “For U.Va. Students” page has been expanded to include all current U.Va. students, undergraduate, graduate and international students. This popular site now provides current students with one-click access to pages important to them, including academic, daily life, and support services. Since these lists are long, the page has collapsible categories, allowing the viewer to see what they want to see without lengthening the page on the default view. The “For U.Va. Students” page also features a special RSS feed of events on Grounds. International students and graduate students still have their own pages with additional resources, which are linked from the Current Student page.

 

Schools and Admissions Split into Two Pages

The current single page “Schools and Admissions” has been split into two pages to offer more direct links in the fly-outs from the Home Page and second-level pages.

Appearance: New Width and Photography

To keep up with the general increase in monitor resolution and bandwidth, the new U.Va. Home Page has adopted 850 pixels as its new standard width. The additional space allows for more features, links, and information. The home page photography features faculty, staff, students, and scenics. 

Flash and JavaScript

The U.Va. Home Page incorporates Flash to enhance the user’s experience. JavaScript and a minimum of Flash version 6 is needed to view these new features.  If you don’t have Flash, you can still use the site; a detect has been installed and will automatically display a non-Flash version. The rotating large photos have been converted from Flash in an earlier version to JavaScript to address a display bug in Safari.

Kids Page !

A new Web page for kids (and their parents) was developed as part of the new Home Page. The new site offers Word Sorts, a Crossword Puzzle, Coloring Pages, History of UVA for Kids, Trivia Games, and lists of programs and services offered at U.Va. for kids and their families.

 

Text/Accessible Version

Every U.Va. Web page has a dynamically generated, text-only, and accessible version, for people with disabilities and users of assistive technology. All of the text versions are W3C and section 504/508 standards compliant. The U.Va. Home Page has been tested to function for almost all users. In addition to users of assistive technology, such as screen readers, it is recommended that users who wish to disable JavaScript, or on a few pages, users with browsers that do not support most CSS using the Text/Accessible Version is recommended.

If you are on a handheld device or have a very slow Internet connection, you may want to try using the text versions to gain quicker accesses to the information you are looking for. Since the pages are dynamically generated, there is no loss in content. Learn more about our Text /Accessible Versions.

 

 

A-Z Website Index

The new A-Z Web site Index hosts a database-driven alphabetical index. You can view the A-Z Web site index by letter or category.  Current categories are (1) View All; (2) Academic Departments; (3) Centers/Institutes; (4) Hospital/Clinics (5) Libraries; (6) Documents/Policies. We also display the last five additions to the A-Z index so viewers can see new sites posted to virginia.edu. With the expanded categorization of the A-Z Web site index, we have removed two second-level pages: Administrative Offices and Documents/Policies.


Compatibility

The new Home Page has been tested for use on Macs, PCs and other Internet-abled devices. It is designed to provide an enhanced experience in modern browsers and a functionally equivalent low-graphics version for users with older browsers, hand-held devices, and assistive technology.

Use of Tables for Layout

The sixth design of the U.Va. Home Page uses dynamic content, Flash, CSS, and new accessibility links, but we have continued to use tables for the main layout instead of converting completely to CSS. The use of tables allows more users to share the same online U.Va. experience. Although all viewers have the option to use the text versions, by not converting completely to CSS, users with browsers that do not render many of the CSS tags used for positioning still have the option of using the graphical version of the site without losing any of the design, functionality, or content.  As technology continues to become more universal and these older browsers are phased out, we will continue to change, and with the next redesign will most likely be able to take advantage of CSS positioning and still reach almost all of U.Va.'s online audience.

 

Expanded RSS

With the use of RSS feeds on second-level and special interest pages, units can update their own RSS feeds, giving users access to the most recent news and information. This will help keep the content fresh and add to the usefulness of the pages. The new RSS Feeds are displayed throughout the new U.Va. Home Page. On Things to Do/U.Va. News, there are two new RSS Feeds: Special Announcements and Events. Check out feeds for information about what's going on around Grounds. On both the Admissions and the Prospective Students special interest pages, there is a new RSS feed with news from the Office of Undergraduate Admission. The Health/Medical Center page has two new RSS Feeds, one from Health System News and one from Student Health News.  Libraries has two feeds with the latest library news and events. The Research and Centers page includes an RSS feed of Featured Research News. The Public Service/Outreach page includes two RSS news feeds, one from Community Relations and one from Outreach Virginia. The special interest page for Faculty and Staff also includes a new RSS feed with news from Human Resources.


New Blue Bar



The top blue bar navigation on the Home Page second-level pages includes two new links: Webmail and the University’s Emergency/Critical Incident page. In the event of an emergency, the blue Emergency tab will turn red to point you to an updated emergency page.

Support U.Va. Link

The University of Virginia is now officially undergoing a $3 billion Capital Campaign.  You can get directly to the Campaign site through the featured graphic on the U.Va. Home Page.

Featured Links

Featured links are still displayed on the Home Page.  Please let us know if the featured links are useful, and if so, which ones you use most often.

Updated Week In Photos

First published in May 2005, the Week in Photos has become a popular destination from the U.Va. Home Page (13,000 visitors a month). The updated version includes larger photographs, thumbnail previews, and a built-in archive gallery.  Week in Photos features photographs taken by students, alumni, families, faculty, staff and other members of the Virginia community. A preview of it now appears on the left hand lower portion of the Home Page

What’s Missing or Moved

  • Google Web Search: Since most browsers have easy access to Google or other universal Web searches, we did not include it on our search menu choices.
  • Four navigation buttons were removed from the Home Page in an effort to streamline the choices on the page while offering the broadest categories of use, for both internal and external audiences. These links are still available but from other places:
    • Computing: Computing is a valuable internal resource and is still a second-level page, but it is now linked from Featured Links on the Home Page.
    • Policies/Documents: Policies has its own Web site now (which the Policy Office maintains), but you can still get to a list of policies and a list of documents from the A-Z index categories for Policies and for Documents.
    • People/Web Search is available next to the People search on the Home Page and second-level pages.
    • Administrative Offices: overlap between the Administrative Offices page and the A-Z index made the page redundant; use the A-Z index for all office A-Z listings.
  • All Academic Departments:  the page still exists -- it is now a linked page on the fly-out menu on the Schools button. You can select Academic Departments as a category on the dynamically generated A-Z index.
  • All About the University: The “All About the University” page, a useful resource for anyone wanting to learn more about U.Va., is still only one click away off the Home Page.  The All About U.Va. link is now available from the Welcome Center fly-out menu and on the Welcome page itself.
  • Selected Addresses: the page has been added to the Featured Links and the footer so it is available on all second-level pages.
  • Web site Directory from Search Page: This page received few hits and was inefficient to keep up to date, so links to personal Web sites were removed.

Miss the Old Home Page?

We won't be updating the links but you can still use it here.


Working Group

The 2007 U.Va. Home Page is the result of work done by a University-wide team of faculty, staff, and students, as well as outside designers and photographers. In the Web Communications Office: Nancy A. Tramontin, Director of Web Communications and Lead Webmaster; Jonelle Kinback, Senior Web Developer; Steve Johnson, Senior Web Developer; Diane Bishop, Web Developer; Nicole Breeden, Web Communications Associate; Chris Husser, Technology Coordinator for Student Activities; and fourth-year Arts & Sciences student Shellinder Mann. Photographs on the pages are the work of Dan Addison; Tom Cogill; Bill Sublette; and Chris Myers. Megan Jacobs is the site designer.

Last Modified: 18-Sep-2007 09:30:25 EDT