DePaul’s Web site is one of the university’s most visible and widely used communication channels. From the top layers to individual department and program sites, these Web pages create a strong impression about DePaul. It is vital that they reflect the university’s mission and brand promise and complement other communication tools. In addition, consistent Web standards benefit both you and users in several ways:

1. Help Web visitors find what they are looking for.
   Consistent navigation and design help users more easily move between portions of DePaul’s Web site, providing a seamless experience that improves their impression of the university. When every site within the university's Web structure uses different navigational conventions, visitors are frustrated by being forced to learn a multitude of ways to find the information they seek. By adopting consistent design and navigation templates, communicators and Web developers can provide a standard method of navigation that allows users to more easily navigate between and within University Web sites.
2. Promote a unified, cohesive online brand.
   Web design templates are used for two primary reasons. The first is to ensure that visitors to sites featuring DePaul programs, initiatives, departments, people, and achievements know they are visiting a DePaul site. And the second is to improve the overall consistency among certain aspects of DePaul Web sites by addressing issues including look and feel, color palette, font choices, and navigational conventions.
   
   While addressing these issues, the templates have also been created to ensure flexibility in design and encourage uniqueness among sites throughout the university. The templates are not intended to make all sites within DePaul look the same. Templates provide for:
   • Improved usability
   • Enhanced institutional branding
   • Improved conformance to international standards for accessibility
   • More efficient design, development, and maintenance
   • Improved portability to new standards and technologies
   
   Standardization can greatly help those who design, develop and maintain sites. With adoption of carefully selected standards for layout, design elements, and navigation comes the freedom to focus on the quality of the content. In addition, use of common tools and techniques saves time and money, allowing us to reinvest resources in other vital areas of the Web.
3. Help Web visitors who seek global information.
   One of the most frequent complaints our Web visitors have regards their inability to find general university information. This often includes centralized contact information, access to general search features (for both people and departments), as well as access back to the University's home page. Too often visitors navigate to areas within the University's Web structure where they are unable to easily get back to these broader, top-level University resources. The templates have been designed to ensure that all users can get to more commonly used resources at any time during their online experience.
4. Help units develop pages more easily and at less cost.
   The templates provide communicators and Web developers with a convenient structure to be used for their specific needs. Consequently, developers will not have to "recreate the wheel" each time they develop a new site.