University Launches New UKY.EDU Home Page

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 10, 2010) — As part of our continuing revamping of our Web presence at the University of Kentucky, we have completed the redesign and are launching a new version of our homepage, UKY.EDU (www.uky.edu).  You are now able to examine the exciting new look and functionality for the site.

The philosophy behind the new Web strategy features UKY.EDU as our "magazine" — a way to tell our story to the world via new media.  While the content on our new homepage is important and relative to all constituents, much of its content speaks to an external audience who are discovering our University in great detail for the first time. 

Since we have so many stories to tell about what is going on at UK, it was our vision to create a platform for our faculty, staff, alumni and students to have a voice and tell their UK experiences firsthand.

Likewise, UKNow (www.uky.edu/uknow) is our key communications tool for the campus community — a type of daily newspaper, if you will. This site was designed, built and implemented with our current students, faculty, staff and alumni in mind. But, UKNow is much more — it’s a central hub for everything happening at UK and where you’ll find out about the daily news and accomplishments at our university.

The redesigned UKY.EDU prominently features video technology to help showcase the accomplishments of our students, faculty, staff and alumni. The site is divided into seven sections: “see blue.” (our campaign for student recruitment), Lexington, research, living, learning, community and impact.  Each section features four videos relative to each topic and showcases our beautiful campus and our journey to become a Top 20 public research institution. 

The focal point of the UKY.EDU site sets the stage for an intuitive video experience that allows the potential student, staff, or faculty member to learn about UK with ease. As the natural behavior of online viewing reads from left to right, our primary category “see blue.”, introduces UK in a way similar to YouTube, a video site that is heavily viewed both in the United States and internationally.  The seven video sections give the user access to 28 high-quality videos about UK.

You will also notice a middle navigation bar that pulls out additional “top links” according to our analytics and provides the end user easy access to those highly visited subpages.  Lastly, in response to user feedback, the navigation bar has been streamlined with drop down menus, allowing UK to showcase more links to colleges, departments and services. The new navigation bar is universal and will be implemented on all UK administered pages.  This navigation bar was initially released on UKNow and has been slightly modified with improvements, based on user feedback. 

Our top navigation header displays 16 primary categories containing hundreds of easily accessible links.  A few examples of what is included within those categories are unique college and department web sites, various campus resources, and an easy-to-use Search function, with the primary goal of allowing information to be located and accessed as easily and quickly as possible.  This asset is also repurposed as an option made available through the UK Web Templates catalog to further unify all online properties.

Please evaluate the site and reply to this message with any feedback you have regarding our new UKY.EDU.  All feedback will be evaluated and considered for future updates.  Thank you very much for taking the time to examine the exciting new look we have for UKY.EDU.