What?
We are in the process of redesigning university’s web pages and unifying them under a common umbrella. Which university web pages? It will be a website for everyone – new, attractive, and diverse. It will be easy to navigate, both for our visitors and for the university members who maintain the pages.
The integration of central data sources, such as those for degree programme data, research data, and personal data, will also reduce the effort of maintaining the pages. The data will be maintained where they need to be maintained in any case for our administration, and the site will do the rest automatically (wherever possible).
The pages need to be completely revised both visually and technically, and some of them need to be redesigned from the ground up. Several of the parameters, such as the content management system (CMS) WordPress, have already been chosen. Others are currently being developed.
Another topic we would like to inform you about in this connection is the introduction of the new corporate design and its implications for the existing web pages. It was introduced on 1 March 2023 and includes all guidelines for the university’s visual identity.
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?
The university-wide relaunch process began in 2021 with a call for tenders for an agency. The contract was awarded to the agency ‘Von der See’ from Emden (https://von-der-see.de/), which has been working with the website relaunch project management team since the end of 2022 to redesign the visual, structural, and technical aspects of the university website. The relaunch is planned for late summer/fall 2024. In line with the technical disposition of the CMS WordPress, we are successively developing individual functional components for the new website, so-called blocks. In parallel, we are coordinating within the university on technical and organizational issues. The organizational units are being informed about the possibilities for preparing their structural innovations and content for the relaunch as well as about the migration to the new CMS WordPress.
The project plan shown below visualizes the three dimensions of the project and the interdependencies of the various work packages.
Who?
The project management team is implementing the relaunch in cooperation with the agency ‘Von der See’ from Emden. ‘Von der See’ was selected in a competitive bidding process based on the ideas and needs of the university.
Project director Silvio Fischer is responsible for coordination between the various user groups at the university, the steering group, the supervisory group, and the agency. He is the central project manager and contact person at the Office of University and Science Communications, where all threads of the project come together. Benjamin Ackermann is responsible for the technical implementation of the website relaunch and the coordination with IT Services, where he assumed the post of technical director of the CMS team in February 2023. Maximilian Beyer from the web editorial staff at the Office of University and Science Communications is handling the structural and content design of the University of Freiburg’s new web landscape.
Silvio Fischer
Project Manager and Coordinator
Department of University and Science Communications
Benjamin Ackermann
Head of CMS
