What?
The university’s web pages are getting a complete makeover and will be brought together under a common framework. What university web pages? It will be a website for everybody, a new, attractive, diverse website – easy to use, both for our visitors and for the university members who maintain the site.
The integration of central sources for things like degree program data, research data, and personal data will also significantly reduce the effort involved in maintaining the site. The data will be maintained where they have to be maintained anyway for our administration, and the rest will be done, wherever possible, by the site automatically.
The pages need to be reworked in optical and technical terms for this purpose, and some of them need to be redesigned from the ground up. Some parameters, like the content management system (WordPress), have already been determined, while others are currently being worked out.
The University of Freiburg has a new corporate design as of 1 March. In order for the corresponding new university logo to be added to existing websites, the official university themes will be updated accordingly.
The homepage and all subsites in the existing WordPress multisite system will be updated centrally – as is intended to be the university-wide process for the new website after the relaunch.
If you operate Plone websites (Plone 3 and 4) with the official university theme, you do not need to worry about integrating the logo at this point but may wait until we provide you the new theme, probably in the course of March. Individual customizations with the new CD elements are therefore not necessary and could come into conflict with the customized theme. Further information on this issue will be sent to the IT Services admin distribution list.
We unfortunately cannot offer any customizations centrally for websites that have departed from the university’s standards. A guide for websites outside of the design is currently in preparation. With the exception of embedding the new logo into the web pages, there will be no design adjustments to the website for the time being. The full design change for the university web pages will take place within the context of the website relaunch.

When?
At the moment we are collecting and structuring the feedback on the needs of different user groups. This will provide us with a basis for arranging, prioritizing, estimating the time and energy involved, and studying the implications. Then we will have to design, develop, and test the pages and conduct any necessary approval or procurement procedures. The important thing for us is to only make projections regarding the timeframe that you can rely upon and that give you a reliable basis for your planning. We will of course be able to gradually refine the schedule and name concrete details for individual interim steps and the switch itself. We will do this by means of the timeline shown on this page and through general project communication. As to the current state of the project, we ensure you that the website relaunch has very high priority for the Rectorate and within the university as a whole. Accordingly, it will be performed in a way that is consistent with this high priority and as quickly as possible.


Who?
All of us. The entire university is invited to contribute ideas. For this purpose, we have prepared a supervisory group, workshops, and surveys. As of now, you also have the possibility to contribute your ideas, concerns, and suggestions directly on this website. You are of course also welcome to contact us directly.
The steering group and the university as a whole will be supported in their work on the website relaunch by an agency with expertise in the areas of website relaunch, modern methods of addressing target audiences, and user navigation, as well as in design and multimediality. The agency will be selected in a call for tenders on the basis of the university’s ideas and needs. Mr. Adrian Yass from the Department of University Science Communications is the central project manager and contact person and will coordinate the activities of the different user groups at the university, the staff at the IT Services Department responsible for the technical implementation, and the agency.


Silvio Fischer
Project Manager and Coordinator
Department of University and Science Communications

Benjamin Ackermann
Head of CMS