A faster and clearer browser, an advanced design, adaptable to all devices, richer and better integrated contents, and a cutting-edge IT engine.
The new Politecnico di Torino website is a completely renewed tool, designed for an open, modern, inclusive university, aware of its impact on society. A university aware of its more than 160 years’ history, offering excellence teaching and research, and responding to nowadays societal needs. Politecnico cultivates curiosity, also being attentive to the challenges of the future. Now, thanks to its new website, PoliTO is even more open than before to all those – and there are many – who are looking for answers to their needs, whether in terms of training, innovation, or knowledge.
In 2020, Politecnico launched a complex process for revising its online presence, in order to offer a more effective tool, and to better represent the transformations that it has been leading in recent years.
This composite project involved the whole Politecnico community in redefining the structure and architecture of all the information distributed in what, over time, had become a stratified galaxy of webpages. A project meant to create a unique portal combining the IT side, key to all university websites, with all the services and information needed to describe PoliTO complexity.
The PoliTo4Impact strategic plan defines the website as one of the main tools for public and stakeholder communication. Its revision, after 25 years of stratifications, is seen as one of the strategic plan’s key points for improving information visibility and access to all users.
May 2020 thus saw the launch of the project NIPO – New Online Image and Presence, instituting an internal work team (composed, in particular, of the Information Technology and the Culture and Communications areas) supported by the external companies Wellnet s.r.l. - H2H Creative Production s.r.l. and Sixeleven s.r.l., for the overall review of the web portal. Politecnico also profited from the consultancy of SparkFabric s.r.l. for technical implementations, and of Meetweb s.r.l. for reviewing some contents.
The new website project was not just focused on redesigning graphics to adapt them to PoliTO new image and logo, which were renewed as part of the same project to be more effective. The aim was, indeed, a new website reorganizing the existing contents and integrating them with new relevant ones.
Due to the complexity and vast scale of the information to house in this new portal, the project is still unfolding, and will be continuously updated and improved in the next few months.
Easy navigation
The website has been designed for quickly identifying the content desired from wherever the user is browsing. The drop-down menus open as the mouse passes, and the (always explicit) use of paths guide the user, also supported by multi-accesible pages. The user is no more forced to keep a linear navigation path, being able to reach any desired content from wherewer needed.
The more conventional “hierarchical” navigation, has been enriched by the navigation by “persona”, i.e. based on user types: a button in the upper right-hand corner menu can be clicked from any page, to directly reach selected contents for students, professors and so on.
For those interested in thematic navigation, the website offers a clear division into macro-sections, each equipped with a secondary home page presenting the main contents at a glance. Each section is then integrated with the others, in a network of references and connections enriching user’s experience.
User-centered
The overall design of the new website is, above all, conceived to place the user at the centre. The goal is to directly adress the many Politecnico audiences, each with its own language, assuming their point of view.
The website is thus designed to meet the user needs, both for what concerns information and document access and for a welcoming experience with attractive and modern graphics: well-defined icons and colours, adaptability from computers to smartphones, and page loading speed.
Content-rich home pages
To provide an overall view without even entering the detailed sections, home pages were conceived with highlights and featured contents, also including updates, in real time, from the whole Politecnico community.
A more powerful “engine”
Technologically speaking too, the new portal is at the forefront: all the website components are housed on the University’s “on-premise” infrastructure that ensures, by using virtual servers distributed across various data centres, great reliability and efficient scalability.
As far as regards the software component, we chose to only use open-source components, and the heart of the website consists of the Drupal 9 Content Management System, customised to be wholly integrated with PoliTO IT systems (teaching, research, and internal administration). Real-time updating of all the data and information published is thus ensured.