League Launches New Website
By Julianne Coyne | Friday, August 20, 2010 1:23 PM
After a year-and-a-half-long journey, UIL has unveiled a newly redesigned website.
“The goal of the site is to try to get people into the appropriate content area as quickly as possible,” UIL Webmaster Stephen Tidmore said. “People know what area of the site they want to see, so we want to help them get there more easily.”
To help make navigation easier, the website was categorized into UIL’s three main concentrations, athletics, academics and music, Tidmore said.
“Everything is different in the new website,” Tidmore said. “The design and architecture have changed and made for a much more dynamic website. We are able to integrate The Leaguer with the homepage better and feature different parts of the website on the homepage.”
Leaguer updates and additions to other parts of the website will be featured in a recent news feed on the homepage. Visitors to the site will also have the chance to subscribe to this feed.
“The new website also will allow us to add new elements to the Leaguer,” said Jeanne Acton, journalism director and managing editor of the Leaguer. “We will now have videocasts, audio slideshows and more. We have a great team working hard to expand our coverage and add this new media.”
This is the third major revision to the website since its creation in 1996.
“The website was overdue for updates,” Kelly McCollum, IT director, said. “We wanted to eliminate the junk that had accumulated since we started the website.”
UIL started seeking out bids from professional design firms last summer.
“We’re trying to be current with the technology that’s out there and keep the site attractive,” Executive Director Charles Breithaupt said. “The new site gets people where they need to go more quickly, and I think the attractiveness of the site will bring people to the page more often. We had a high traffic count already, but we are always looking for ways to make things better and more user-friendly.”
Tidmore said he expects the website to evolve.
“One of the challenges we had when building the site is that we have a lot of different types of visitors who interact with the site differently,” he said. “The site will evolve as we see how people use it, so we can better meet visitors’ needs.”