The School of Media and Public Affairs wanted to branch out from the rest of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. The SMPA is a school that explores how ideas and information are communicated and how people inform and influence policy and politics and they felt that the site that they were initially using was not conveying that message well enough.
The SMPA had three key pieces of information that they wanted to have prominently showcased on their new site: their blog, news updates, and a school specific RSS feed. After viewing the schools analytics it was determined that indeed these were the three pieces of information most viewed by users of the site and therefore it was decided that a spot on the front page (making the wanted information that much easier to access) would be the most appropriate place.
Because the SMPA was one of the most visited sites in GW, there was extreme emphasis put on ease of use and retrieval of information. We adhered very strictly to the 3-click rule where no piece of information should take more than three clicks to find.
The color scheme was easy because the SMPA wanted to conform to the GW style guide as to be instantly recognizable as part of the university.
The site was built on Drupal backbone and designed as such. Each page was given a separate template depending on the option to which it conformed such as for classes, students, events, and so on.
