Carleton.edu Website Redesign

This project is the planned next step after Web2020’s backend migration to WordPress and will focus on a visual overhaul.

It’s driven by 2023–2024 national market research that showed we need to:

• Increase Carleton’s national awareness.
• Better communicate about our location and affordability.
• Elevate the importance of student outcomes.
• More cohesively integrate key messages about the liberal arts, our outstanding faculty, and what makes Carleton distinct.

The redesign also aligns with the refreshed brand platform completed last year. To that end, the entire site is being designed with a primarily audience of prospective students and their families, while also making sure that alumni, current students, and faculty and staff can still easily find relevant information. We also have a goal of reducing redundant content and standardizing site navigation.

• Navigation: The primary site-wide navigation and footer will be new. We’ll also add breadcrumbs (see example for visual) for easier navigation.
• Site structure: The overall sitemap (or site structure) will change to improve user experience and reduce duplicate content.
• Visual elements: We’re adding more modern and flexible WordPress blocks (like new image galleries and updated card blocks)—similar to the Admissions site—to show as well as tell Carleton’s story. The site will also use Carleton’s expanded color palette.
• Gateway pages: Pages for returning users (e.g. Alumni, Faculty/Staff, Students) will be standardized and streamlined for utility, with less visual clutter.
• Messaging: To align with our brand position, you’ll see more up-front, distinctive messaging on high-traffic pages (e.g. Home, Discover Carleton, Life on Campus).
• New sections: We’ll be adding new, top-level sections, notably “Guides” and “Carleton by the____.” See early mockups of these pages below.
  • Carleton by the ____ content is primarily for prospective students. It gives a sense of Carleton either by photos or numbers or student voices. There will be fewer of these, and they’ll be more evergreen content.
  • Guides are intended to have a broader audience, including both prospective and current students, and go more in-depth on certain topics. They are more evergreen than blogs, but like blogs, these will have categories like “academics” and “student life”.
• Visual density: The new design will be less dense with more white space (additional padding, or breathing room) for both text and visuals.
• Sidebar blocks are going away: All sidebar content — content that lives under the left hand navigation or in the right hand column — will get relocated. One goal is to create a more modern, less cluttered page layout, utilizing more full-width blocks.

Current academic site template:

New template for academic sites:

Template for Carleton by the _____, a new content type

Template for Guides, a new content type

Your role stays the same

• You will still edit your site in WordPress. Your editing interface will not look significantly different.
• Our site management model remains the same: You own your content; Communications and ITS provide support, tools, and resources to ensure performance and accessibility.

We will be pausing intake of any new website redesign requests

• Since all sites will be getting a visual redesign as part of this project, and again, since there are 600+ websites to prep, we’ll be focused on the most highly visible and visited pages.
• You can still submit tickets if something is not working on your site.

Key actions and support

• Sidebar migration: Starting in Fall 2025, Communications will begin moving your sidebar content into the main body of your pages. We will notify you when we work on your site so you can review and approve our first pass.
• Audit opportunity: This is the perfect time to audit your site. Look for pages that can be archived, photos that need to be updated, media libraries that need cleaning, and content that is outdated.
• Training and help: We’ll offer drop-in office hours before winter break to answer your site-specific questions.
• Editing access: We do not anticipate a “do not edit” period for your site. We will pre-load any content updates in a way that works with both the current design and the new one, so everything will be ready when the new theme is activated.

• June 2024: Redesign process started.
  • This involved the work of a working committee, steering committee, and user feedback testing from several audiences, including students, alumni, faculty, staff, and parents.
• Fall 2025: Communications begins reaching out to schedule sidebar content migration.
• Fall 2025: ITS imports new WordPress “building blocks” and tests functionality. Communications works with departments to prep content.
• November–December 2025: Site maintainer trainings and working sessions. Preview the new design, drop-in working sessions for prep work and questions, and tutorials on how to prepare for the new theme application.
• January–June 2026: Communications and ITS focus on getting all 600+ sites ready for the new standard theme.
• May–June 2026: Heavy quality assurance and testing period for site maintainers.
• July 2026: Goal — New standard theme applied to the entire carleton.edu.

We are using Asana to manage this project, given the volume of sites, the phased and detailed nature of the work, and the number of people involved.

Asana invite: If you are not already using Asana, you will receive an Asana notification with a subject line: “Action Required: Megan Hovinen [or another team member] Invited you to Join Carleton.edu in Asana.” This is not spam!

You don’t need to have an Asana license to become a collaborator on your site. When you get the invitation, you will be prompted to make an account, but you will not be added to the Asana Enterprise Pilot Program that some of campus is a part of. You will likely receive a notification that you are a part of a free trial. This is okay. Please do not set up any billing info.

Adjusting your Asana notifications: If this is your first time using Asana, the tool’s default setting is to send you notifications via the ‘updates’ section of your email inbox (if you have foldering enabled). We will tag you in a comment in Asana when communicating with you about your site. We recommend visiting the system settings to adjust your notification preferences to only get notified via email when tagged, as the notifications can add up. Reach out if you need assistance with this.

To adjust your Asana email notifications to only get notified when tagged (our recommendation): Go to your profile picture in the upper right > Settings > Notifications > Email Notifications > Communication > only check “Someone mentions [you]”.

If you manage multiple sites: We’ve tried to keep your point person consistent, but that’s not true in all cases. You’ll get ONE Asana invite, but since each site is its own task within Asana, you’ll get notifications on a site-by-site basis as we move through them, and it could come for different team members.

We hear your concerns. As we prep sites for the new standard theme, which moves us toward more of a single-column design, pages will inherently be longer and less dense. The design philosophy driving this full-column layout change is to give site users the most important information first, rather than all the information all at once, which can lead to cognitive overload. Reducing the density of our pages and, when possible, introducing more visuals, will help guide users more efficiently and make the site feel less dated.

We’ll need to make decisions about what content is the most important to live at the top of the page. You can, as site maintainer, still move blocks up or down if you want to reorder your content, and also change layout blocks.

Our current site design has been very dense, so the single column approach is honestly one of the bigger adjustments to the new design theme that we’ll all be adapting to, and it will get easier (and better looking) as we get the new blocks, more formatting abilities, and get used to working within it.

In the meantime, as we move through this site prep phase, certain blocks, such as news and events, will take up more space. There are also some formatting that will not be as elegant if this were falling within our current theme. This will be a short term phase; it is part of the migration process we need to use for this project, to avoid having to pause site editing on multiple sites for long periods of time.

Fall is a great time to focus on decluttering:

• Review our general year-end WordPress cleanup list.
• Archive pages that are no longer relevant. If no history of the content is needed, or if it is backed up elsewhere, consider deleting old and outdated pages; make sure to check with the site owner first.
• If you have questions or feedback about this project, please submit the form below. This way, for common questions, we can keep building out our FAQ page and training resources.

Content covered included: Updating your Asana email notifications, preview of sidebar migration, and a preliminary discussion around PDFs