Western Washington University Unveils New Website

Contact: Western Washington University Office of University Communications at (360) 650-3350 or news@wwu.edu.

BELLINGHAM – Western Washington University unveiled its new website – www.wwu.edu – on Tuesday, Aug. 30.  

The new website was designed to connect with the off-campus community with a central goal of attracting prospective students. It was built using Drupal, a free, open-source content management system.

The new site replaces Western’s old site which had gone basically unchanged for more than eight years; the new site was also built as a major piece of Western’s rebranding efforts that were put into motion in January.

Work started on the project last fall, beginning with research and gathering data on what prospective students were looking for when they came to Western’s website. This data was incorporated into a features list and built into a wireframe for usability testing, and once that was complete, design work was begun in Drupal.

More than 1,000 prospective and current students, faculty and staff assisted Western’s on-campus website redesign group in user testing and feedback during the process and more than 8,000 external users provided input and data during the initial research phase.

Some of the new features of www.wwu.edu include videos; a campus photo section hosted on Flickr; a guide to Western’s 140-plus majors; a database of faculty research at Western; stories highlighting student, alumni, and faculty excellence; an interactive campus map; RSS feeds of upcoming campus events and news items; prominent links to Western social media outlets; and more.

For more information on Western’s new website, contact the Office of University Communications at (360) 650-3350.