The Source Redesign

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Strategy

The main goal of the new site is to increasing engagement with external audiences specifically to:

• Promote attachment/connection to the university
• Inspire WashU/community pride
• Champion our people and ideas

We performed an audit of the existing site to surface the most impactful opportunities. This included a traffic analysis, polls, focus groups, and listening sessions. The results helped to identify our key audiences goals.

By elevating the visibility of the Newsroom, The Record, and Washington magazine, we support the existing connections with their audiences and foster those audience’s attachment to the university.

Pairing the impact of our publications with enhanced digital features allow for more opportunities for site visitors to engage with content across all three brands and increases opportunities to cross-pollinate stories in The Source as a whole.

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Digital

Within one platform, we designed unique sections for each of our publications, with styling that gives users clear visual cues and a main navigation that clearly reminds them of where they are within The Source. Throughout the site, we reinforce the publication branding by labeling story thumbnails with “Published in…” icons (Washington magazine/Newsroom/The Record).

The redesigned landing pages are dynamic and easy for Source editors to maintain, including the Home page, which has three sections that can be either automatically or manually curated: Our People, Our Expertise, Our Impact.

We introduced several features to facilitate user engagement:

A new video gallery

A redesigned bookshelf that better highlights our faculty and alumni library

Multiple layouts for each story with enhanced styling options for sidebars, quotes and Q&A’s, and for image and video embeds

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