Ghent University website: 5 lessons on how to handle a complex redesign project

With 120 subsites and 100,000 pages, Ghent University’s website had become a tangle. Basing ourselves on thorough user research, we drew up a new, greatly simplified information architecture and UX design. And we aligned all the faculty websites.

A new website: urgently needed

Ghent University’s Communications department had been insisting for years the website was due for a makeover.

They had several good reasons for this.

Lesson 1: Patience is a virtue

The university’s project team was faced with a complex task. Made even more complicated by a number of factors specific to large-scale organizations such as universities.

Firstly, various stakeholders had to agree to the concept of the new website: the university chancellor and all the faculties and departments.

Moreover, Ghent University didn’t just want a new website. They were also ready for a new corporate identity.

And simply providing the website with a facelift would not be good enough, is what Dieter Kirchner and Ann Van de Spiegle realized. They are responsible for the university’s public portal site. “We had been wanting a new website for years,” says Ann. “But as with any large-scale organization, it took a while before we could really make it happen.”

Lesson 2: Respond to your visitor’s top tasks

AGConsult carried out user research to determine the cornerstones for the new website.

Logfile analysis, online top task surveys and interviews with staff and students gave us a thorough understanding of the top tasks of the different types of visitors.

We also discovered that the website contained a lot of information nobody was really using or even looking for. This meant that we could cut out a lot of these pages from the new website. “We manage around 100.000 web pages,” said Ann. “That is a huge amount. We need to tackle that amount of pages on a project-by-project basis. AGConsult helps us to monitor all these projects.”

Els Aerts, Managing Partner at AGConsult: “Based on the results of the preliminary research we drafted the structure of the new website. During workshops with the team at Ghent University and several rounds of user testing, we refined the concept of the different types of pages.”

Lesson 3: Have 1 crystal-clear structure for all faculty websites

Another issue we had to tackle: ensuring consistency across all faculty websites.

Although most of the faculty websites looked the same at first glance, different faculties kept the same information in different places. Our user research showed that this lack of uniformity in the information structure caused problems and annoyance for many visitors.

We worked on a UX design and structure that ensures that visitors can easily find what they are looking for. What people expect from a faculty website is in fact largely the same, no matter which faculty website they’re using. Of course, we made sure our framework also leaves room for the specific individual features of each faculty.

“We had been trying to streamline the websites of the faculties for 10 years,” says Dieter. “We pulled it off just in time. On the Monday following the launch of our new corporate identity, the last faculty joined us. All 11 faculty websites are now aligned, both in terms of layout and information architecture. We couldn’t have done that without AGConsult.”

Lesson 4: Go digital with your corporate identity

They were in dire need of a new corporate identity. The previous website was old. In those days, Ghent University’s print layouts were used as a model when designing the website. And that showed.

This time, Ghent University did things the other way around. The website played a guiding role in the creation of the new corporate identity. They wanted it to be both simple and appealing.

The Dutch agency Fabrique was selected as the corporate identity partner. They were also responsible for the graphic design of the new website.

“As graphic design is only 1 aspect of a successful website, AGConsult also assisted us in this stage. They guaranteed the functionality of the design, putting emphasis on the user-friendliness of the website. This was particularly important for the mobile version of the website,” says Ann.

Lesson 5: Use an endpoint as a fresh start for your website

Even though the work is done, Dieter is already looking ahead: “We still have the ambition to further distinguish ourselves from other universities, both on a national and European level. We’re already doing extremely well in this respect, but we continue to strive for excellence.”

“As far as we’re concerned, our long-standing collaboration with AGConsult will definitely continue. AGConsult has been one of Ghent University’s preferred partners since 2008. They bring along expertise in so many areas that we consider them an essential team member. For example, we will do more user research next year. We want to learn what could be improved on our main sites so that we know which changes we need to make. Of course, we’re over the moon with our new website, but the work is never done.”