Designing an Arizona Branded Website
Welcome to the guide for designing an Arizona branded website. This page will provide you with all the resources you need to create a visually appealing and easy-to-use website that aligns with the Arizona brand’s visual style and meets the needs of both users and content creators alike.
User Experience Comes First
Arizona websites aim to not only be visually appealing, but also deliver the best user experience possible to a wide variety of audiences. In order to do this successfully, many factors need to be considered such as:
- Analytics & Data
- Research & Testing
- Information Architecture
- Content & SEO
- Wireframing & Prototyping
- Accessibility
- Development
- and more
Ideally, all these aspects of user experience design should be utilized to ensure you’ve accounted for your user’s needs and goals. This will also help remove your own personal biases out of the decision making process. For a more detailed view of the website creation process, please visit our Web Project Workflow page.
UX Resources
There are many resources available to help you learn more about User Experience design - one of which is right here on campus. UX@UA has created a robust website of information and learning resources for user experience and hosts monthly meetups to help build knowledge and network with others in the UX community.
Websites:
- Nielson Norman Group
- Smashing Magazine
- UX Matters
Books:
- Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products and Services by Jan Kablonski
- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Podcasts:
- UX Podcast
- Ramblings of a Designer
- The Futur
These just scratch the surface of what is available online. UX@UA has created a larger list of resources here or simply searching google will lead to a plethora of valuable information.
Arizona Website Visual Style
Part of a good user experience is having an attractive, consistent and intuitive User Interface (UI). This includes the use of white space, color, typography, and various visual components like icons, buttons, and images. Utilizing the available UI components through Arizona Bootstrap is a great way to ensure you create a branded website that is cohesive with the rest of the Arizona website ecosystem.
Below are examples of Arizona websites to help inspire you.
CAPLA: College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture
Admissions web pages on Arizona.edu
James E. Rogers College of Law
R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy
Wireframes/Prototypes
Before you start building a website, it's crucial to create wireframes and prototypes. Wireframes help you plan the layout of content and overall structure of the pages of your website, while prototypes give you a clear idea of how your website will look and function with final colors, content, interactions and images.
Not a designer? Creating a Branded Website is Easier Than Ever
At the University of Arizona, we offer Quickstart (Drupal Content Management System). Quickstart is perfect for creating a website with minimal effort. By utilizing the available Arizona Bootstrap components through Quickstart, you can ensure your website is branded and cohesive with the rest of the Arizona website ecosystem.
Accessibility
Accessibility is an essential aspect of user experience design for web and by law the University is required to meet ADA compliance. This includes proper color contrast, content formatting, image descriptions, avoiding text in images and more.
To ensure your website is accessible to all, we recommend using DubBot, the university's tool for crawling your website and providing an accessibility report. You can request access to DubBot through our IT Accessibility Consultation Request Form.
Handing off to Development
Once you have designed your website and it has been approved, it is essential to hand it off to development. Generating a link with development specifications from either Figma or Adobe XD is easy and provides the development team what they need to begin work. That being said, it is always best to meet with developers and discuss the design to ensure there are no technical restrictions and they have all the information and assets they need.
Saving Assets for Web:
Saving assets for the web is an important last step. During the prototyping process, engaging images should have been selected that align with the Arizona brand. You can use your own unique images or you can find and download assets from our Digital Asset Management system. Saving them for the web includes ensuring they are the correct dimensions, files size and RGB color mode.
Conclusion
Creating a university branded website is an exciting and challenging process, but with the resources available, it can be a rewarding experience. We hope this guide has been helpful, and we look forward to seeing your branded websites.