Website Improvement

Follow UND's website improvements.

See the New Templates in Action

The New Year will bring us a new website and we’ve finally got working templates for you to see.

3 Big Changes

Our new templates employ a number of best practices to increase usability. Chiefly, you’ll notice three major differences:

  1. Responsive – The site is programmed to detect the width of each user’s web browser and automatically rearrange content to provide optimum viewing on any screen size. This means our site will work well on all devices, including desktops, tablets and smartphones.
  2. Image Heavy – The web world is full of usability testing indicating photography is the primary way to generate positive impressions online. The better the quality of image, the higher the perception of UND.
  3. Long-Scroll – Gone are the days of putting a little bit of information on several pages and needing everything important to be “above the fold”. Nowadays, it’s absolutely natural to scroll.

100% New Template Suite

A robust yet flexible template suite was created to accommodate our academic, research and internal website needs. All templates have one unified and cohesive look that supports our brand and lets everyone know that the page is part of the University of North Dakota’s website.

Please note all templates contain placeholder text to help us visualize what the page will look like. This is not the actual or recommended text.

Universal Template

99% of pages will use the universal template. This core template can be used with or without left side-bar navigation, accommodate different unit headers and footers, and be customized using various snippets. The template has four optional styles of billboards (main image headers).

Exclusive Templates

Custom templates were created exclusively for high traffic landing pages.

  • College/School Home Page – Each college/school will use the same template for their home pages. All components on the page are optional and can be turned on or off.
  • UND Home Page – This unqiue template will be used only once on UND.edu.
  • Program Finder – Our new “storefront” will showcase all academic program offerings at UND. The back end of this template is complex with hundreds of different tags that identify programs based on degree level, learning format, location, desired career etc.
  • Program Page – Every major, minor, master’s, doctoral, and certificate program will use the program page template. These pages will be accessed via a Program Finder and their respective department sites.

What’s Next?

mStoner’s technical team finished HTML development and OmniUpdate is working on putting the new templates into our content management system. This process took longer than expected; therefore, we condensed the optimize and review phases in Wave 1 in order to meet our April 2018 launch date. Wave 2 is proceeding as scheduled.

Please report any template glitches/bugs to tera.buckley@UND.edu. Design changes will no longer be considered.