Sacramento State students logging onto the university?s Web site, www.csus.edu, may or may not have noticed the site?s new look.

The re-design was a collaboration between Paul Nozicka, university webmaster, and Valerie Mighetto, visual image coordinator for university media services. The two have been working on the new design since February 2001.

“Back in February we started feasibility and usability discussions,” Nozicka said.

Nozicka, who has served as webmaster for over two years and is a Regional Continuing Education professor, said that, unlike previous efforts, the new Web site is more user-friendly and easier to access.

“The new design is cleaner, fresher and takes only a fraction of the time to download when compared to the previous,” Nozicka said.

According to Nozicka, the process of redesigning the new site involved coming up with prototypes, which were designed by Mighetto, and presenting them to a committee. Then the prototypes selected by the committee were shown to various administrative personnel and the new design was chosen.

Nozicka said that once this was done, he used the design prototype to create the site. The new site was then extensively tested.

“You can never predict what the (user) will be using,” Nozicka said. “Therefore, the pages are tested on Macintosh, Windows and Linux machines, in various versions, using numerous browsers and browser versions.”

Over the past two years the Sac State homepage has become more user-centered and easier to navigate, he said.

“However, you can?t please everyone all the time, and I know that there are some who preferred the old design and would like to see some additional changes,” Nozicka added.