Brand New English Website for NTNU to Connect to the World
The brand new English website of NTNU has been onboard since June, and hundreds of thousands of page views have been reached. The Office of International Affairs and the Center of Public Affairs have teamed up together and to come up with a new website design. You can feel the internationalization and elegant style of NTNU starting from the front page.
The Dean of the Office of International Affairs, Frank Y-H Ying, said that according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-2016, NTNU scored pretty high on the indicator of internationalization, which can be seen from the school website.
Ying said that any foreign student who wishes to come to NTNU can browse the newly intergraded admission page and know all kinds of admission information within minutes, which is a truly user-friendly design. In addition, NTNU was invited by the Foundation of International Cooperation of Higher Education of Taiwan to speak to offices of international affairs in universities to explain how our homepage is designed.
International Student Advising Manager, Roxane Weng, said that during the preparation of the design for the new homepage, she browsed lots of websites of renowned universities and she found one thing in common, that is, the websites are user friendly and people can find the information they want easily. What most impressed her is the introduction video of Nanyang Technology University of Singapore. Watching the cartoon, which is pretty easy to comprehend, viewers can know about the history of the school and school itself in 1 minute.
Vice President Wu Cheng-Chih also pointed out the drawback of the old English website, such as the information of different centers wasn’t up to date and different formats had been used. He suggested that the can set up a page and put the links of different centers together so that visitors can find the contact information more quickly.
Miss Weng said that in order to be in line with the international practice, they decided to abandon the old design and came up with a brand new look. From the webpage, you can see pictures of NTNU news in big sizes, which is very eye-catching. The categories are simple. Links useful for foreign students have been added, like log in icon for acadmOpenCourse, application for academic degree, library service, and MTC website.
As well as for being user friendly, the new website is hoped to strengthen the sense of identity of foreign students in NTNU. We hope that visitors who come to the website can find out what they want easily and see the beauty of NTNU in the shortest time.
At the bottom of the website, there are links for NTNU News and colleges so that students can know what NTNU has been doing through browsing the news. Since June, more than 280 news articles about international events, academic performances and student activities have been published in Mandarin. With the help of a professional translator, those news articles were translated into English so that NTNU can be promoted in the mostly used lingua franca and connected to the world.