Today, I launched a website I’ve been working on — off and on — for quite some time.
And, it’s one of my favorite sites that I’ve done at the University of Houston.
This is the homepage of the new Department of Psychology website.
The website for the Department of Psychology is the first site that I have developed from start to finish in the new content management system, used by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and purchased by the University’s marketing arm. It is a major redesign and reorganization for one of the most popular departments in the college that brings in a substantial amount of research dollars for a Tier One university.
Since its launch, data from Google Analytics appears to indicate the the Psychology homepage is the second most-visited page in the uh.edu/class directory, second only to the college homepage which I helped launch in November.
Here are some aspects of the design I am proud of.
These four images are "spiffs," an accronym for special interest feature photos. Clockwise from top left, the first photo is a submitted portrait of a student that I edited with Adobe Photoshop to remove the background and placed it on top of an image from the university marketing database. The second photo is a submitted portrait of a psychology faculty member that I also removed the background from, and added some text and a gradient to represent a study that was featured in the New York Times. Following the same technique, for the third image I removed the background of a submitted faculty portrait and added a design that represents research the professor published about algebra. The fourth and final image is one I took of a graduate student on the UH campus to represent an award she won. This is the index of the people section of the new Psychology website at UH. Before I could start desiging this page, I did my best to encourage each of the more than 40 fauclty members to get a new portrait photo taken, and I helped facilitate that process. The portraits were taken by a professional photographer, and we achieved a high participation rate in the high 80 percent range. What I like about the design I created is that it really demonstrates the professional nature of these professors. I tried to design the page so that if a person knows what professor they're looking for they can find that professor quickly with the photo or the name. For visitors who are casually browsing, they're quick to realize these professors are active in teaching and research. Most importantly, their contact information is readily available. Here are four samples of the psychology faculty bio pages. Each faculty member was asked to fill out a form to provide information for these pages, and I edited and stylized that information. Each of the more than 40 faculty members have their own page and own URL that they can use when presenting new research to publishers and the academic community.
