California Lutheran University’s website is currently undergoing an update, including changes that could be seen as early as this this summer.

It has been a while since the website has been changed. According to Erik Hagen, Director of Web Communications at Cal Lutheran, the website hasn’t been redesigned in around 10 years. It needed to be updated in order to keep up with the growth and changes that have been made over time.

“The website has grown significantly and, as a result, has become pretty complex and in some cases difficult to use and inconsistent. We wanted to use the latest web technologies and design techniques to create something fresh and useful for the campus community,” Hagen said in an email interview.

Some of the changes made to the website in addition to updated technology are the design and the organization of the site.

According to Alisa Harrison, Project Manager for the Web Communications team responsible for the update, one addition that will be made is allowing the website to become more easily viewed on mobile devices.

“We’re also getting a design that’s going to be responsive, which is going to make the website mobile friendly… A large number of visitors to the website are accessing it mobile so we needed to make sure it was something you could see on your phone or on tablets,” Harrison said.

In addition to improved technology, the website’s aesthetic will also be undergoing change.

According to Harrison, the new website is meant to be more user-friendly as well as in line with the university’s new brand direction that was released last September.

“We’re also hoping to clean up and improve the architecture of the website to make it easier for prospective students, faculty and staff to find information on the website,” Harrison said.

According to Hagen, there are three goals for the new website’s design.

“To incorporate our relatively new visual identity simplify the structure of the site to make it more intuitive and usable, and to apply a responsive design technique which ensures that the website will look and function great no matter what kind of device you use to access it,” Hagen said in an email interview.

Samantha Chittenden
Staff Writer
Published May 6th, 2015