Porches, Isidore rearranged, given uniform look

Students may have been a little surprised when logging on to Porches or Isidore for the first time this semester. The sites received upgrades over break in preparation for the upcoming spring semester.

The upgrade to Porches was conducted to better facilitate internal communication with our university faculty, staff and students, according to Molly Wilson, assistant vice president for university marketing and strategies.

Sundar Kumarasamy, vice president for enrollment management and marketing, said the renovation takes the universitys portal to the next level and is an opportunity for us to streamline communications and to let the campus community be the first to know the information that defines us as a community.

The most prominent change is the rearrangement of tabs (pages) and channels (blocks of information). Tabs had been set in a linear fashion across the top of the front page, but they are now are found on the left side. The channels, which had previously been set in columns of three, are now arranged in two.

The front porch now includes a periodically changing feature story that highlights an important event or priority that the university wants the community to know, according to Wilson. That story will vary contingent on the individual users status as a student or as faculty and staff. The featured story incorporates a comment section to permit a reciprocal form of communication, an element that was lacking in the previous version.

The front porch will also include a profile of a UD community member and a new channel that will display either a poll question or feeds from the universitys social media channels.

According to Wilson, the university hopes to achieve enhanced functionality through Porches upgrades and establish a more consistent look with the universitys overall web presence. The ultimate goal of the sites overhaul was to continue to build our relationships and overall university community by providing an engaging online environment, she said.

Porches was introduced to the campus in February 2010 as an entry point for accessing information and tools that are relevant to individual students, according to What is Porches?, an explanatory YouTube video uploaded by the university.

Student responses have been mixed in regards to the redesign.

Justin Gregory, a junior economics and finance major, said he did not like it initially and leveled the criticism that Porches now has links to a bunch of things that I have no connection to. However, after some time tinkering with the novel features, the new interface had grown on him.

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Porches, Isidore rearranged, given uniform look