New BUSPH Website to Debut on Oct. 29.

After a year of intensive design, planning, and user research, the new BUSPH website is set to launch on October 29 with a bold new look and improved functionality.

The new website was designed with several tangible goals, according to Dakota Chichester, lead designer of BU’s Interactive Design team, who delivered a brief demonstration at the September Faculty Assembly.

The new site will consolidate several information channels into one central location by combining the main SPH site with both the Insider and the Student Insider. The streamlined structure will offer users improved navigation, Chichester said, with many of the current pull-down menus and other layers of navigation condensed into a more-user-friendly format.

One change will be an A-Z directory of faculty and staff sorted by department, with information gleaned from the BU Profiles research-networking site. Faculty members will be able to change their own information on the BU Profiles site and the information will be dynamically updated in the SPH directory.

The University is positioning BU Profiles as a major way for faculty and researchers to network, collaborate, find potential mentors, search for relevant panel members and advisory board expertise, evaluate research trends, and reveal how individuals are connected to others in the larger research community.

Consolidating the current sites into one will shift the focus away from news and toward having a greater marketing appeal for prospective students, Chichester said. News and information about the school, faculty and students – including upcoming events — will be tagged and filtered by department and other specific categories to fine-tune the information displayed to users.

Among the most visible changes, especially for mobile device readers, will be the site’s use of adaptive design that can determine the best display for whichever device is used to access the site. Content will be automatically scaled and reconfigured to fit desktop monitors, tablets or phones, similar to the recent redesign of BostonGlobe.com.

The site has undergone several levels of testing by designers, programmers and eventual administrators. In the first few weeks after the debut, new users are likely to encounter minor glitches that accompany the roll-out of any new website. Please feel free to offer feedback and discuss the new changes in a Yammer group for the new site.