This week Green River Community College's Web-Team will be preparing for the official launch of the new GRCC Web site. We will be taking advantage of the Independence Day break to ensure that we have dotted all of our "i's" and crossed all our "t's". When you return on Monday, July 7th, you will see the new site in place.

On April 14th a CommuniGator article was posted, “Test Drive the New GRCC Web Site”.  Green River faculty, staff and administrators were offered a sneak peek at the new site design. A week later, April 21st, we launched the beta version of the new site to the general public.

For the past two months we have been receiving feedback by email, phone, and in person from staff, faculty, alumni, current and future students. We appreciate all your comments and we have incorporated many of your ideas into the first phase of the launch. The second phase (later in the year) will introduce more.

Here are some of the key and exciting features of the new site:

• The introduction of user group landing pages. We have created a streamlined destination for main user groups of our site (Future Students, Current Students, Friends & Alumni, Business & Community). The landing pages will serve as hubs of information for these various users.
• A main navigation streamlines the browsing process. The main navigation in the left side bar offers flyout menus so users can browse the sections of the site by hovering their mouse or using the tab key to tab through the menu items.
• Breadcrumb navigation added to inner pages. To get back to where you started, we have added breadcrumb navigation to pages deeper in the site. These are links at the top of the page that show you where you are within the site. The main navigation will also show you where you are in the site. It will be hard to get lost.
• New promotional slide show and “Student Spotlight” added to the home page. A new and improved slide show has been created for promoting our programs and courses. There are now thumbnails you can click on to go directly to the slide of your choice. The Student Spotlight will be used to feature the accomplishments of our students.
• Improved accessibility. We have taken a giant step forwards towards Section 508 compliance by building the site with screen readers in mind. The new site should be a much easier to listen to and navigate for users with low-vision or blindness.
• Google Search added to each page. We introduced the Google Search a few months ago in the old site. Now you will be able to conduct a search on any page of the site. No more jumping to a separate search page.

If you haven’t visited the beta site lately (or if you didn’t know we were redesigning our site) please use this link to jump there now to take a look. Feel free to send us feedback using our Feedback Form.