The NCAA is launching a complete overhaul of its Web site to provide members with easier access to information they need and to enable users to conduct business with the national office more effectively and efficiently.

The revamped site, which is set to be unveiled in early September, has been in the planning stages for more than a year. Once in place, the site will offer users an easier way of navigating and finding critical information.

"The new design will be cleaner, better organized and will better serve the most frequent user needs," said Internet Administrator Gregg Summers, who along with Managing Director of Information Services Brad Alderson led the e-community project to redesign the site. "We believe it will be easier to find information, because that was one of the complaints we heard constantly. Even though people liked the depth of information on our site, they found it hard to navigate."

Alderson said the planning for the site started last spring and has been championed from the beginning by NCAA President Myles Brand.

The first stage of the project consisted of research conducted by WilliamsRandall, an Indiana-based marketing communications firm, to determine who was using the Web site, what they were using it for and what they were looking for once they got to the site.

The studies showed that users most often go to www.ncaa.org looking for information related to employment, championships, sports news, online forms and compliance information.

The most frequent users of the site are staff at NCAA institutions, such as coaches, sports information directors and athletics administrators; the general public; student-athletes; parents of future student-athletes; high-school administrators; and the media.

Interviews -- over the telephone, in-person and through online focus groups -- were conducted with members of those user groups to obtain more specific information about what they needed from the site. Williams Randall also moderated goal-setting discussions with senior national office staff.

WilliamsRandall then presented six main goals for the site: Enable members to conduct business with the national office more effectively, help members do their jobs more efficiently, increase member self-service, encourage collaboration and learning among member institutions, provide high-quality customer service, and serve as a public relations tool for the Association.

Summers and Alderson said there were a few surprises that came out of the research.

"What surprised me a bit was the popularity of a few key areas, that so much of our site traffic is generated out of a few areas and that the rest of it is thinly spread over everything else," said Summers. "We knew that employment was very popular, but we were hearing from a lot of groups the same kinds of things -- employment, championships information, LSDBi and stats. A lot of traffic comes just through those areas."

Alderson said he was surprised at the volume of hits the site gets each year -- about 20 million visits a year. Traffic, he said, also is noticeably higher during certain times of the year. In March, for example, traffic is roughly double that of an average month

"It's a lot more traffic than I had ever imagined and there's a lot more interest out there than I would have ever thought," Alderson said.

After the research stage was completed, IBM was chosen to redesign the site. About a dozen proposals were submitted to the Association after distribution of a request-for-proposal, and Summers said IBM was chosen for the breadth of services it offers and the experience the company has with large-scale Web sites.

To date, initial usability testing has been completed and the final design is being developed. The new site will have more of a focus on the academic side of intercollegiate athletics and also will feature more up-to-date news and information about the Association.

When the site is launched in early September, the old site will still be available as information is transferred from one format to the other. With 50,000 pages, it would be impossible to transfer everything at once, Summers said.

"What you'll see in September is a better presentation of the navigational links to our existing site and the most frequently visited pages," he said. "The majority of the site will look the same at that point and will migrate over time based on traffic information."

The launch does not mean the end of the project, but the beginning of a new era of sharing information.

"This is not a project that has an end date," said Alderson. "We want to make a commitment to continue to update this and keep it fresh so that the design doesn't get old. We're going to commit to this for the long term."