Help Us Redesign Duke Today

Duke Today celebrated its first anniversary in March. We've learned a lot this past year about how a web newspaper can work for a university community, and we're currently redesigning the site to make it more useful. Before we launch the new site, we'd like your help.

The new Duke Today is meant to take care of several shortcomings of the current design. Too much good material is pushed to the bottom of the page, below most readers' screens, and never gets seen. The headlines in the News You Can Use section are too hard to read and not well organized. The promise of interactivity -- of allowing readers to contribute to Duke Today through polls, surveys and submissions -- has not yet been realized.

We hope all of these above issues will be resolved in the new design, a first draft of which is pictured left. In addition, we're hoping to give more substantial space to video and multimedia material, which have been very popular on the current site.

We need to know what you think would make Duke Today more useful and effective for you. What kinds of alerts do you need? What kinds of benefits, employment and human resources information should be included? What services are you using on campus that we can help you with? Are there dining and other specials you would like to see? For those of you who aren't using Duke Today, what kind of information would help attract you to the site?

These are just some questions we've thought of to start the conversation. Please send your ideas to duketoday@duke.edu. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on improving Duke Today. In a couple of weeks, we'll return with some of your ideas and an update on how the redesign is going.

Geoffrey Mock, editor