The College of Public Health is in the process of redesigning the CPH website at www.public-health.uiowa.edu. We have set a target launch date of March 1, 2021.

There are three main objectives to this redesign:

• Bring our website in line with the new University of Iowa brand standards, which rolled out on the UI website in May 2020.
• Make our website more appealing to prospective undergraduate and graduate students.
• Introduce new back-end tools to make it easier and faster to build web pages with a high number of design elements.

The College of Public Health Communications Office invites feedback from the college on the new design. You can see the site in development here:

Address: https://test.public-health.uiowa.edu
Username: cph-communications@uiowa.edu
Password: Public-Health-Rox-2021

Please take a look at your convenience, and send along feedback, questions, concerns, etc., to:

CPH Web Manager Patrick Riepe
cph-webmaster@uiowa.edu.

If your concern is something that must be addressed before launch, please submit it by Feb. 19 so we have time to implement it.

As you share comments on the new site, here are a few things to bear in mind:

• We mostly need feedback on prospective student pages, department home pages, and the site home page. These are the pages with the most amount of new content. There are some places for “news” that feature placeholder content or old news — and ideas on what to put there are appreciated.
• Much of the design is set forth by the university brand standards. You can read all about the university’s brand at https://brand.uiowa.edu. In short, all of our new site’s fonts, colors, logos, navigation menus, search bar, iconography, and page layout are determined by the university brand and can’t be changed locally. This design was researched, created, tested, and implemented by a large team of marketing researchers, designers, artists, photographers, and developers and has been very successful to date.
• Our CPH site content is very much under our control, and is among the highest-quality content on campus, according to university-wide scans by Siteimprove. Most of the content on our site will not change with this redesign. New site content is primarily on our home page, student recruiting pages, and departmental home pages — so pay close attention to those.
• Many links on the test site link to the CURRENT live site. If you find yourself on our current site, change “test” to “www” in the URL and you will be back on the test site.
• Most of the site content in our test environment is from over a year ago when we started developing this new design. You might see outdated versions of your pages, and a lot of very old, pre-pandemic news. Don’t worry: The new site will have all our current content.
• For those of you who edit web pages on the site, the process WILL NOT CHANGE. Same software, log-ins, etc. Some pages will use new design tools, but we will roll those tools out slowly to everyone, with advance training, over the next year or so.
• You can continue editing the current site, as per normal. No need to wait until after March 1. Just keep doing what you’re doing!
• Our test server is designed for testing, not for heavy traffic. As such, it runs quite a bit slower in test mode than it will when it is launched. So please be patient!
• There are bugs! Most of them we know about and will be correcting over the next month. Many of the bugs are unique to the test environment and won’t be present after launch. But there are bugs we DON’T know about, so let us know what you see.
• We have a lot of work over the next four weeks. Changes/fixes will have to be prioritized. However, our website is a living, breathing document, and editing and improving the site will continue — as always — after launch. A good website is never done!

Thanks in advance for your help and support, and thanks especially to the dozens of people throughout our college who create and maintain the excellent content on our site. We plan for this redesign to only make our site better.