Dear Campus Community,
We wanted to share an exciting update on the progress the Office of Communications and Marketing is making toward the redesigned university website.
Current Stats
The university website includes about 180 individual sites. In 2021 when the content audits began, there were 8,614 pages within ualr.edu. Thanks to the crucial content audits where pages were reviewed, updated, combined, and/or removed, we have reduced the number of pages down to 5,383. By conducting these audits and updating the content on each website, we have ensured our website is providing accurate and relevant information to our various audiences and is supporting our university’s goals. We greatly appreciate your support and collaboration during this work.
Launch Preparation
The launch of the new website will be an exciting moment for our university. We gathered input from several campus partners to determine the least disruptive time of year to launch the new site. We want to avoid launching the site at a time that would negatively impact students.
Our goal is to make final edits in December and begin testing in January. We aim to launch the new site in February 2025.
Development and Migration Planning
The new site is being built on a cloud-based server and the development of our custom designs and new functionality is in progress. Each individual website will need to be migrated (copied) from our current site and moved to the new site. The new site will have improved functionality, a modern design, and will also meet accessibility guidelines.
Migration Phases
Each site’s migration process will consist of two phases:
- Phase 1: Making a copy of the site and moving it to the new redesigned site on the cloud-based server
- Phase 2: Manually converting parts of that site’s content into our new, designed block sections
The site’s content (text, images, forms, buttons, etc.) will be copied to the new site. The new site will have the updated look and feel. We will then manually convert parts of each site’s homepage into our new, designed blocks. We will repeat this process for all university sites.
When a site is copied over, the old site will still be visible and live, since the work is happening behind the scenes on the new site.
Example of a section of content on our current site:
After manually converting that section of content into one of our designed blocks:
Pausing Content Edits
An essential element of migration will be the need to pause content edits. Once we make a copy of a site, we want to avoid new content and edits being made on the current site because those edits will not be brought over to the new site. Only mission critical edits will be made.
We will work directly with site web editors to adjust access when it’s time to begin migrating each site. We will also make sure that site editors understand the process to request mission critical edits.
We want to assure site owners that pausing edits is temporary and we will continue to support their site’s needs during this phase. We will communicate more details soon with the site editors.
Launching the New Site
After all sites have been migrated and the individual homepages have been converted to using the designed blocks, the web team will move forward with officially launching the new website. This involves launching the new homepage and new global navigation.
Prior to launch and throughout 2025, training and additional resources will be provided to site editors to ensure they are supported in the new site.
We know how important the website is in helping future and current students learn more about UA Little Rock. Thank you for your support during this process and go Trojans!