By ERIC WEISSMAN

Organized around the school’s four primary goals — education, research, patient care and community service — the site’s architecture gives visitors easy access to key elements of the Stanford experience. The new site is available at http://med.stanford.edu.

The newly launched redesigned Web site is organized to suit the strategic mission of the medical school, emphasizing education, research, patient care and community service. It is available at http://med.stanford.edu. Photo: Courtesy of IRT

"One of the hallmarks of the medical school today is how central strategic planning is," said Henry Lowe, MD, senior associate dean for Information Resources & Technology, or IRT. "We wanted to express those themes in an organized and aesthetically pleasing way."

The significance of the school’s online presence can’t be overstated. Lowe’s group studied traffic on the old site, finding it had upward of half a million hits per month, two-thirds of which came from unique users and the vast majority from outside Stanford. "But the old site was out of date and organizationally couldn’t do the job of giving the best first impression of the school, which is what it needs to do," Lowe said.

"With the new Web site up and running, the school can more powerfully communicate what Stanford medicine is all about," said Philip Pizzo, MD, dean of the medical school. "We want to make our strategic plan, ‘Translating Discoveries,’ and the unique features of the School of Medicine readily accessible and inviting so our community better understands the value and importance of academic medical centers and the inextricable connections between education, research, patient care and community service in the 21st century."

The redesign has been among IRT’s highest priorities over the past year. In addition to reorganizing the content, Lowe said the new site focuses on creating a more unified and consistent look for the patchwork of centers, departments, divisions, programs and labs that combine to form the medical school.

The site also makes it easier for both current and prospective students to find the information they need.

"This redesign was not a simple change of colors and fonts," said Michael Halaas, associate director of Web development, who spearheaded the redesign effort. "We rebuilt the site from the ground up — improving design, organization and structure."

Halaas pointed out that better technology underlying the site will ease the burden on the more than 150 people throughout the school who will continuously update and add to the site. "The way it’s put together allows Web authors to maintain their content far more easily while allowing us to centrally manage the site more effectively," he said.

Halaas said the new site enables improved access to resources such as a forthcoming faculty research directory, events calendar and the stream of news emerging from the school. Overall content maintenance will be a collaborative effort while technology and hosting will be centralized in the IRT group. IRT also will provide training to Web authors to help them update their corners of the site.

Collaboration was key to the redesign process itself. In his initial planning, Halaas corralled different groups of faculty, staff, researchers and administrators to better acquaint himself with their needs. He and lead Web designer Kevin Boyd then commissioned Factor, an outside design firm, to create the initial look and feel of the site, including basic functionality, color, size and shape of the pages, font selection and other design elements.

These initial designs were further vetted by Halaas and Boyd and then passed through multiple rounds of scrutiny by various members of the larger groups before a "final" design was selected. And then, as is often the case with Web design, the final design was further changed, refined and recast up until about a week before launch.

Lowe and Halaas emphasized that the launch represents only the start of a much larger project. "We’re in phase one of numerous phases," Lowe said, predicting the process will take about two years. "But the top-level pages we have are such an improvement over what they’re replacing that now’s the time to get it up and running."

Halaas said the 3,000-plus pages on the new site represent only a small percentage of the total number of pages that exist on the server. Various departments, divisions, labs and individuals will be able to create or update then upload their content to the new site as the tools to do so become more widely available.

"We encourage all the people and labs with a Web presence to maintain their pages individually and we can accommodate people who want to change their current pages to match the overall look of the new site, but we won’t force them to change," said Lowe, who added he has seen tremendous enthusiasm for the project.

Lowe encouraged anyone with feedback or comments to contact IRT through the group’s Web site at http://irt.stanford.edu.

School of Medicine

Information Resources & Technology