From the Nominator

The Building a Better Future: York University Academic Plan 2020-2025 website illuminates the new UAP 2020-2025 and its six priorities for action, with inspirational, interactive content that is rooted in York University’s history, values and commitment to a more just and sustainable future. At its core, the UAP 2020-2025 is about coming together to make positive change for York University’s students, campuses, and local and global communities. The plan and the website serve as a call to action, and contain blueprints that position York University as an agent of positive change in a world facing an unprecedented convergence of trials from climate change, a global pandemic, racism and xenophobia, poverty, and inequality.

Dynamic and responsive, the UAP 2020-2025 website illustrates with vivid detail the university’s attention to these trials as articulated in Building a Better Future. The website also addresses the York community’s collective focus on supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The new website explores the critical details and proposed actions that are contained in the UAP 2020-2025. It offers impact stories and content showcasing the actions of students, faculty, and staff who are responding to this call by bringing their expertise from across disciplines to work together to build new knowledge and tools, develop strategies, and craft solutions to global challenges.

The website is a changing entity that can be updated with latest activities and results. University community members are invited to visit and explore the plan, and offer their stories, inspirational results, and share their successes.

From the Judges

Often the best website experiences are the simplest, but that doesn't come without a lot of strategy, planning, and attention to detail. York built an elegant website to house its academic plan, and managed to bring to life an institutional document that could easily have slipped past many people's attention. Instead the website got outstanding results: thousands of pageviews, an average of 6.1 pages per visit, and about two-and-a-half-minute average site visit. Those results were driven by crystal-clear navigation that was reinforced throughout the experience, a compelling visual design that elevated the master brand, and well-curated content that highlighted the university's actions and outcomes against the plan. The team managed to accomplish all that while paying special attention to accessibility—no easy task when juggling such complexity of content.