In the year 2013, WU moved to its new campus, which gives WU’s faculty, staff, and students an impressive architectural environment for research, working, and studying. It's high time for this stimulating environment to be reflected in WU's online home, its website. Our new website applies state-of-the-art technology, for instance a responsive design that adapts to a broad range of different end user devices..

What’s New?

For any organization, the website is one of the most important channels for communicating with the world. This holds true particularly for a university with an international orientation and a large target group of users who cannot simply drop by on campus and have a look around in person. But a university website has to live and grow, because it needs to cater to a wide variety of different target audiences and features information provided by many different organizational units. For this reason, the structure of WU’s old website closely reflected the organizational structure of the university as a whole. With our new website, this has changed in a fundamental way: The information provided on our web pages has been restructured from a more user-centric perspective and made more easily accessible.

There have also been far-reaching changes in terms of the underlying technology and the look of the website: The goal was to implement a state-of-the-art design that represents WU’s special ambience and appeal. This has resulted in a calmer design with more room for the featured content to have the best possible effect. At work, we spend more and more time in front of all kinds of screens. This is why it is particularly important to make sure that website content is easily accessible and easy to read. As a public institution, WU is also obligated to offer a barrier-free online presence, so we have implemented barrier-free accessibility for all parts of WU’s new website. The website also adapts automatically to the device from which it is accessed to ensure the best possible mobile user experience.

What’s Next?

If you wait for your product to be perfect before you launch it, chances are that it won’t be launched at all. This is one of the lessons we’ve learned during this project. This means that, here and there, some content will still have to be revised or new functions will need to be added after the relaunch. The WU website will be improved and expanded continuously. We will also be working to improve other online applications and services. As pointed out before, a website is constantly changing and never fully complete. That being said, we’ll be working hard to make our website as optimal as possible.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the project team members and the many WU employees who have been working to restructure and redesign our web content. It’s thank to all their hard work that our website is online today. My sincere thanks also go to our external partners who have supported the web relaunch project.

Kind regards,

Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger