University Unveils New, Sleeker Harvard.edu Website

Visitors to Harvard’s main website can now learn the story of John Harvard’s foot as part of a relaunched Harvard front page.

A picture of the statue, along with a note explaining how passers-by keep the foot shiny by rubbing it for good luck, is one of the shots in the site’s new Harvard photo album.

The picture changes each time a visitor loads the page, offering views from Eliot House to the Harvard-Yale crew race to Tercentenary Theatre.

The photo album is one feature of the newly redesigned website, which was unveiled yesterday to allow faster access to Internet content on the University’s many web sites.

“We felt that there were better ways to make access to Harvard more clear and more quick,” said University spokesperson Joe Wrinn.

The site is designed to limit the use of Harvard lingo and replace it with terms common to users outside the University, who constitute about 70 to 80 percent of the visitors, according to Wrinn.

For example, the main page now features links to each of the University’s schools. Instead of labeling these links with the formal name of the school, more generic names are provided—the Faculty of Arts and Sciences website, for instance, is called “college/graduate.”

According to Wrinn, the redesign was sparked in part by the feeling that to fully use the website, users had to know something about Harvard already.

“People were taking longer than they should have to find the college or the business school,” Wrinn said.

Last winter, the University conducted a random web survey soliciting feedback for the site. Confusion was a common complaint, Wrinn said.

This redesign is the first in a series of improvements. Although the front page now looks different, the interior content layout remains largely the same. The next changes will focus on the interior pages.