The web site for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is produced and maintained by Public Affairs.

Goals for the Illinois campus site

• Reflect the excellence of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Help site visitors quickly find the information they are seeking, throughout the galaxy of University of Illinois web sites


• Provide useful, up-to-date content for current and prospective members of the campus community


• Introduce new or updated features that address critical campus needs


• Establish a framework that enables future improvement and enhancement to campus web communications.

Process for creating the site

This site represents a careful effort to solicit and analyze the needs and opinions of the campus community. Specific steps in the process include:

1. Broad survey of the campus community


2. Analysis of past feedback (e.g., through campus web email)


3. Interviews with students, faculty, and staff


4. Field tests of site nomenclature


5. Usability tests, whose results were used to improve site navigation


6. A public beta (test version) of the new site, which generated hundreds of comments from current and prospective members of the campus community


7. Specific requests for review and feedback from individuals in the colleges and administrative units and from prospective students

If you are interested in the technical or editorial aspects of site development, please feel free to contact the Office of Web Services.

Site appearance and accessibility

This web site has been designed to be as accessible and useful as possible for all site visitors. The appearance and performance of this site have been optimized for as many configurations in operating systems, browsers, and computer hardware as possible. If you are unsatisfied by the appearance of the site, you have a few options available to you:

1. You can change the size of the text on all pages.

• From the menu in Internet Explorer, choose View/Text Size.
• From the menu in Netscape, choose View/Text Zoom.
• From the menu in Opera, choose View/Zoom.

2. You can use the text-only version of the home page.

3. You can adjust your monitor settings.

Web pages look different on nearly every monitor. You can compensate for this by setting your monitor to provide a view most comfortable to you. You typically make these settings using buttons on the front of your monitor or by using the "display" control panel in your operating system. Settings that affect your appreciation of web sites include:

• Screen resolution (Increase your resolution to see more information at once. 800x600 pixels is the minimum to ensure this site does not scroll horizontally.)
• Brightness (You can choose a brighter or more subdued look.)
• Contrast (May help you reduce fuzziness)
• Refresh rate (Increase the refresh rate setting--in Hertz--to reduce flickering.)

4. You can upgrade your browser.

In most cases, more recent versions of browsers have fewer bugs and render web pages more effectively. Most browsers can be downloaded from the web for free. Before upgrading, check that your computer has sufficient processor speed and memory to support the new browser.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Web site was design by Creative Services, a division of Public Affairs.