Design Completion

The End of a Partnership

July marked the end of a nearly 3-year engagement with our redesign partners, OHO Interactive. Initially, the collaboration was a simple endeavor to enhance the school’s digital presence and increase student engagement. However, a shared commitment evolved into a relationship that proved both demanding and fruitful, with team members from each side mulling over the interests of individual units and innovations in the digital domain. The redesign core team is grateful for the work OHO has provided, and excited about sharing it with the rest of the Bellevue College community.

Wireframes and Annotations

OHO’s wireframing work began upon completion of their sitemap development phase in March. The core team was provided with two rounds of review and revision to confirm that their outline provided us with a clear overview of each site’s architecture, layout, flow, and intended behavior. We received a final version in late April, which paved the way for our transition into the development of the Annotations, a document expanding on each area of the design in detail.

This Annotations document provides us with comprehensive information about design elements, their features and functionality, limits of use, and taxonomy. In addition to the document itself, a handful of calls took place to walk us through changes made that were either noteworthy or a distinct deviation from those elements established during work on the core site. The Wireframes and Annotations document were the groundwork for the Component Content strategy; without them, a redesign of this magnitude would not be coherent nor sustainable in the long run.

Component Content strategy

To help our website team manage the amount of requests they receive on a daily basis, OHO spent a large part of June reviewing the challenges expressed by managers and provisioned our core team with a document highlighting suggestions based on their findings. This Component Content strategy guide illustrates use of website components, and provides information on how to develop content, proper use of page types, and suggested times to update content/copy. It also provides suggestions for improving readability and employment of CTA’s, all broken down by applications toward individual page types.

Design Application

The final designs for our division, department, and support sites were confirmed in mid-July, with little in the way of major revisions requested. Core team members expressed a nearly unanimous favor for the final product, which, understandably, shares many characteristics of the core site. While still months from deployment, we look forward to delivering the remaining sites, in their entirety, to the rest of the college.

Next step: Development

Design of the remaining sites is only the first half of this phase of the website redesign project. Members of the Information Technology Services Integration team will soon be developing the code that will provide a back end for this work. Beyond code development, communication, training, and support have yet to be determined before deployment of any kind can be planned. We anticipate a staged rollout, in which members of the website team partner with individual units to ensure complete functionality, prior to going live. While no specific launch dates have been confirmed, we will be working on identifying and providing managers with windows as more information becomes available.

The core team would like to thank the Bellevue College community for its support and patience over the past year, as well as the guidance provided by stakeholders, the president’s cabinet, and our co-sponsors, Rebecca Chawgo and Rodger Harrison.

If you haven’t already, check out the updated Bellevue College Style Guide for information on publishing standards: https://www.bellevuecollege.edu/faculty-staff/style-guide/