Site Redesign

This year, my co-editor-in-chief and I decided that along with the many structural components that were changing within the Aquila staff—from an over 100% increase in staff size as well as additional strategic leadership members—the Aquila site would also undergo a renovation. Since its inception seven years ago, everything about the site, other than the content, has stayed the same, including the banner, the home page and the placement of the sections.

Redesigning Sections on Student News Online (SNO)

SNO is our container website and produces all the components of our site. Although I’ve learned to design on SNO, upload, and add various multimedia elements to create visually appealing articles, I had never learned how to design the elements on the site itself. That was soon about to change.

Over the period of two months, my co-editor-in-chief and I would spend EIC meetings scouring student news sites, The New York Times, The Washington Post and more to get a better understanding of how news sites were presented. The strategic team and I would also meet during our weekly meetings (for more detail, see Leadership and Team Building ) to sketch out our section-specific designs.

For example, see our STEM section below. The left side is before the redesign, where uploaded articles are just listed in a direct, scroll-up-scroll-down manner. The right side is the current design, separated into repeaters such as Blooming from the STEM (a new alumni repeater), STEM Spotlight (short features on STEM clubs), STEM Scene (global STEM briefs), Global Reset (climate change repeater) and a COVID Vaccines repeater added this year to increase vaccine transparency in our community.