This morning we made a change to the WSU Impact area and footer on wayne.edu (opens new window). I wanted to write a quick post to explain the change.

The Problem

The WSU Impact area was designed for items that are longer standing than regular news, often lasting a few months and impact the institution as a whole. Over the past year we've added things to that area because there was no other spot on the homepage for them. The items we added are forever standing and will not change over time. We filled up the WSU Impact area quickly and it made the page feel unbalanced.

The Solution

We ended up adding a second row to the footer for these forever standing items that will always be connected to the university and need a presence on the homepage. They include WDET, URC (opens new window) and the voluntary system of accountability (opens new window). This now gives us enough room to promote things that impact the university every few months that regain the goal for the WSU Impact area.

In addition, we added a link to the "Accessibility (opens new window)" section of our site. Although this area is mainly related to physical building accessibility we will be expanding it in the coming months to include web and digital accessibility issues and resources.

With this change in place the bottom half of the homepage is now evenly balanced and whitespace is evenly distributed. Over time we will continue to evaluate the effectiveness of these links and the WSU Impact area.