This project involved an entire redesign of housing.uiowa.edu. It has been 5 1/2 years since a major redesign. It was redesigned in the spring 2022 using Drupal CSM and moved to SiteNow v3 in order to ensure web brand standards across the University of Iowa. I worked with 10 task force team members in University Housing and Dining, conducted usability testing on target audience demographics, gathered in-depth Google analytics, conducted a card sort to determine a new menu structure, laid out all site pages, wrote all site copy, selected all site images, and worked with the Office of Strategic Communication (OSC) web development team to have customized development on residence hall pages and a custom hall selector based on taxonomy terms on this site. This gallery showcases the homepage, reasons why students should choose to live on campus at Iowa, living learning communities, residence halls, my housing (a section where current residents of the halls can find the information they need).

This site follows AP style guidelines, which is the writing style of the University of Iowa. Additionally, I also wanted to ensure ADA compliance, which meant removing 20 non-compliant PDF file formats from the previous site and reducing it to 5. Information contained within the PDF file formats was integrated into the site itself through accordion drop-downs.

It’s worth mentioning that this web property, along with its companion site, dining.uiowa.edu, has a significant presence on Iowa’s campus, with this website averaging around 54,000 visits per month.

This website was also selected as a model to follow for applying the Iowa brand to the web and is highlighted on brand.uiowa.edu and the UI Web community site. Additionally, this site was also selected to be featured as a presentation to conference attendees at the 2023 Higher Ed Web Annual Conference.

Please note: Site content and ownership is now being managed and updated by another team. The site below was launched on August 22, 2022.