Welcome to the new look and feel of WSU Insider, the university system’s central news and information hub for faculty, staff and the greater Washington State University community.
More than a redesign, the update represents a complete platform rebuild featuring enhanced content integration, improved site navigation and a visual presentation that reinforces the WSU Insider’s primary function as a daily news-style information source. It’s the first major update since its formal launch in 2018.
Readers should find the site easier to use and navigate regardless of whether they’re accessing it from desktops, laptops or mobile devices. It also introduces improved search functionality and updated site categories.
On the technical side, upgraded site mechanics provide greater flexibility and coordination between various content streams enabling new features such as related-story suggestions and a running list of the week’s most read articles.
General design
The new design is based on standard news-style websites, both in terms of visual expression as well as within the back-end mechanics of how the site functions, providing greater flexibility in how articles and other content are presented.
It is intended to be more engaging and to reinforce the news and information function of WSU Insider, a communication style known as brand journalism.
Content integration
The homepage features easy access to not only the top featured content of any given day but to the standing category sections, which no longer are as reliant on visual imagery for every post. It also provides greater opportunities for highlighting articles of broad interest.
Individual story pages now include multiple entry and referral points to help readers easily navigate through the site without having to return either to the homepage or rely on navigation menus.
The Announcements section, a service that pre-dates WSU Insider and features user-uploaded content, has a more prominent navigation link and is easier to access from the homepage. Additionally, individual postings will remain visible longer on the Announcements landing page, which now uses a seven-day rolling list display instead of a day-by-day presentation to reduce the number of duplicate and repeated postings.
As with any major rebuild, please be patient as the News team works through glitches and other generally minor transitional annoyances that are common when years worth of content and site mechanics are migrated on to new web architecture.
Your comments and suggestions are welcome. Please feel free to share by emailing wsunews@wsu.edu.
