STANFORD UNIVERSITY OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY LICENSING
Top of the class web redesign
Designer: Rebecca Pastore
What’s in a name? A lot. And it can be essential
when your name already says you’re among the
best in your field. Such is the case with Stanford
University’s Office of Technology Licensing (OTL).
Senior associate Mary Albertson says that while
the design for OTL’s branch of the university’s site
is clean, it’s also uninteresting. “It’s difficult to navigate
and doesn’t capitalize on the Stanford name.
We don’t want our page to look like a ‘university’
page necessarily,” says Albertson. She would prefer a
design “that reflects the creativity of our inventors,
the breadth of the technologies we manage and the
venerability of Stanford.”
Designer Rebecca Pastore’s personal goal for this
redesign was to make it easy to identify the content,
subjects and structure of the OTL website so users
can better discover relevant information—by designing
a functional, easy to use and clean website. “I
wanted the site to be consistent, concise, familiar
and, most importantly, legible,” says Pastore. To
achieve these goals and maintain the same look and
feel throughout, Pastore uses bulleted lists for top
breakdown, keeps the navigation where the user
expects on every page and in the same format, and
makes the site easy to read via contrasting web-safe
fonts and background colors—no patterned backgrounds—smooth gradients and common screen
fonts such as Tahoma.
“A major benefit to the newly designed
CSS—cascading style sheets—menu is that it makes
the website SEO—search engine optimization—friendly,” explains Pastore. “The old site’s navigation
was in Flash, which doesn’t allow for search engine
spiders to crawl the links. If you use external CSS
files to design and determine the design attributes,
the HTML code will be clean, and it will result in
better search engine rankings. Search engines want to
see your content—the text, not the code. With CSS,
you practically externalize excessive code into an
external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and
simple. In addition, CSS gives the site a professional
look. It’s wise to use CSS to jibe with current trends
in the industry.”
