Fordham University will launch the new fordham.edu website on Thursday, Dec. 4.

On Thursday at approximately 2 a.m. EST, the www.fordham.edu web address will be redirected from the old website to the new one. On campus, the change will be almost immediate, but it may take up to 24 hours before the entire Internet sees Fordham’s new location.

Fordham’s Office of Marketing and Communications oversaw the upgrade, which was supervised by Donna Lehmann, director of online communications. Lehmann and her team began working on the new site in the fall of 2013; their efforts represent the biggest change to Fordham’s web presence in 14 years.

“fordham.edu was overdue for a redesign, reorganization, and an upgrade in management technology,” said Lehmann, whose team rebuilt the website from the ground up. “Starting fresh with a new content management system allowed us to purge outdated content and apply best practices in design and usability.”

“It was also an opportunity to rework our web content so that it better reflects the spirit of Fordham and our community, which is caring, committed to service, and committed to intellectual rigor. This is most evident in the text on the site and in the photography, which captures not only the beauty of our campuses but also of the friendliness of the students here.”

Lehmann said the team also needed to make the site more accessible to mobile devices.

“Mobile traffic is overtaking desktop traffic on fordham.edu (and worldwide). We know that for prospective students, their first experience of a university is on their phones, and obviously we want that to be a good one,” she said.

When the new fordham.edu launches, it will still be a hybrid of old and new. Several sections of the website will be completed and launched separately in the coming months and throughout the spring semester.

All of the old site pages will still be available at a new address: legacy.fordham.edu.

— Janet Sassi