CORRECTION APPENDED SEE BOTTOMA redesign of the Brandeis University home page is underway in order to emphasize academic areas of study more effectively to attract more incoming students and respond to community concerns about Brandeis' Web presence.

Chair of the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering Committee's Subcommittee on Admissions and Recruiting Prof. Steven Burg (POL) and Vice President for Communications Lorna Miles confirmed the plans to redesign the Website. Theyelaborated that the new Web site will feature more profiles of students, faculty and alumni.

Brandeis last redesigned its home page in January 2008. At that time, Miles explained, the goal of the Office of Communications was to emphasize Brandeis' global outlook, the four pillars of the University, Brandeis' proximity to Boston and the fundraising campaign for Brandeis; for the first time, the home page also included prominent information about applying to Brandeis, Miles said.

The January 2008 version also included a flash movie featuring Leonard Bernstein and Eleanor Roosevelt to show Brandeis' history, Smart Balance margarine to showcase Brandeis' research, an image of Prof. David Hackett Fischer (HIST) to emphasize our commitment to the humanities and images of the new science center and of students, Miles said.

"[Smart Balance] was an iconic image that people could recognize but probably didn't know that it had a connection to Brandeis. . It caused a lot of discussions on campus," Miles said.

Many faculty took issue with the presentation of Smart Balance on the University Web site on faculty listservs. Faculty involvement in designing the Web site has been little in the past, Prof. Marc Brettler (NEJS) wrote in an e-mail to the Justice. "The issue with Smart Balance was it seemed silly to many faculty to be represented by a margarine- even if it is a healthy one that we created on campus."

When discussion about Smart Balance resurfaced recently on the faculty listserv established this January as a way for faculty to discuss academic curriculum options, Miles said she arranged for the image to be taken down that afternoon in response to faculty concerns and because she anticipated the Web site would be redesigned anyway. She said she did not think the Smart Balance image deterred incoming students. "I didn't hear prospective students coming in the door and saying, I'm not applying to Brandeis because of Smart Balance.' "

The Office of Communications received an invitation from the CARS subcommittee on Admissions and Recruiting to work on ideas for several new sites, including a new treatment for the home page. "[The subcommittee] is faculty- and student-driven, and this new concept suggests [a] new way of describing ourselves," Miles said.

Burg wrote that the subcommittee is "working with admissions staff, communications staff, faculty, and student committee members to develop seven 'micro-sites,' or pages within the overall University Web site, that will be introduced via much improved labeling and attendant descriptions and links on the homepage." He explained that the goal is to "develop descriptive text and accompanying materials-including, most importantly, profiles of outstanding students engaged in learning and action-that will give prospective students a much better picture of the opportunities for learning, faculty-student engagement, and application of knowledge to real world problems that goes on at Brandeis." he wrote.

Burg also wrote that the working titles the committee came up with for the seven micro-sites are Health and Society, Computational Science, Visual and Performing Arts, Justice and Public Life, Humanities, A Global University and Fields of Practice.

Burg explained that Fields of Practice refers to academic areas that prepare students for practical applications such as premed, pre-clinical psychology, film studies, legal studies, journalism and education. "We expect the micro-site for this area to draw heavily on profiles of students/recent alumni who pursued study in one or more of these areas and now are 'practicing' what they have learned," Burg wrote in an e-mail to the Justice.

The subcommittee has also proposed that Brandeis emphasize on the Web site through links and page placement the terms community, opportunity and social justice as "conceptual labels," ideas that "members of the sub-committee believe capture the essence of what Brandeis offers its students," Burg wrote in an e-mail to the Justice.

Burg further explained that the committee had limited survey research data, beyond the "interests" or "intended fields of study" surveys of the College Board about academic areas that incoming students are interested in. "From this we can see how we might present information about Brandeis in a way that might have greater appeal to a larger number of prospective students," he wrote.

Over the next 12 weeks, staff from the subcommittee and the Office of Communications plan to work together to further refine the plans before presenting preliminary versions of the web pages to the University community, Miles said.

Senior Research and Technology specialist in the Biology department Steven Karel said he would like to have more information about research on the Brandeis Web site with regard to senior theses, course materials and video lectures. "One way of publicizing the University is simply having as much content out there as we can [so that when] people do searches on Google, they wind up finding stuff from Brandeis."

Correction: The article's original headline misleadingly stated that the University Web site has been redesigned. The University Web site is in the process of being redesigned, but the redesign has not been completed.