Date: January 10, 2006
Contact: pr@andrews.edu
Website:
Phone: 269-471-3322

Since its launch in mid-April 2005, the new Andrews University website has received a lot of attention, and more than just from future students checking out the campus, or faculty and staff looking to download an expense report. The site's crisp design and user-friendly layout has won two awards this fall and taken its designer, Martin Lee, to the nation's capital to present at a conference.

The university received its first award back in late August, when Lee received news that Andrews had won an award of excellence in the category of "Entire Website" in the University & College Designers Association's (UCDA) 35th Annual Design Competition. The Andrews site was chosen to receive one of 15 awards of excellence out of nearly 100 electronic media entries from schools across the country. Judges looked not just at appearance, but flexibility, interactivity, suitability for the intended audience, and creativity in design solutions. Winning entries were displayed at the association's annual conference held in San Diego, Calif. in September.

Most recently, Andrews received a silver Pride of CASE V award for Best Institutional Website this past December, competing against other colleges and universities in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Ohio. The award was announced at the CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) District V conference in Chicago, Ill.

"It's nice to see us win awards, because it shows we're being recognized and that our work is paying off," stated Lee, Andrews' web coordinator.

Lee's hard work also took him on the road to Washington, DC, where he presented at the Serena Xchange 2005 Global User Conference, held September 18-21. Serena, the vendor of the university's content management system (CMS), was impressed with the site's online calendar and asked Lee to demonstrate how to create one at the conference.

"Presenting at the Serena conference was a great opportunity to share what we've been working on with other university and corporate users," Lee commented.

Serena also invited Lee to be on their product advisory board, where he's able to share his opinions and make suggestions on future product versions and features.

Currently, Lee is working on more improvements for the website, such as an upcoming virtual campus tour and better search features, as well as continuing the work to get each campus department up and running online. So far, over half of the departments have been trained on the CMS, and there are about 20 that will soon be ready to go live.

"The Andrews web presence has come a long way since its inception," said Lee. "With more and more people going to the web for their information, it's become important for us to make the web a priority as well. We're a small office with limited resources, so we've had to learn to work smarter to accomplish our goals by doing things right with technology and design. And, we're happy to see that we're getting good results."