University website of Liszt Academy renewed

20 March 2014

After nearly four years, the site accessible at Ifze.hu and primarily designed to serve university teaching needs is being replaced by a modern website redesigned in the Liszt Academy image that was launched in 2013.

The new university site is the companion of zeneakademia.hu concentrating on that part of the life of the music academy conducted in public view (concerts, news and services of interest to the audience), which has been accessible since the day the main building on Liszt Ferenc Square reopened following its reconstruction (22 October 2013). The new site has a similar framework but is independent as regards its content, which makes available information for students and professors of the university and students applying to the institution as well as the entire education portfolio of the university. There are two versions, one in Hungarian and one in English.

Concert Centre programmes and news items are not published in full on the university website, although they do appear in headline form; however, university programmes open to the general public and top news items can still be found at zeneakademia.hu. The website of the university is easily distinguished from the cyan of zeneakademia.hu; it features a gold shade harmonizing with the tones of the logo, and orientation between the two websites is further simplified by the boxes positioned on the side bars, and the upper navigation bar, from where there are direct links to the pages of the independent organizational units of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.   

Department and exam concerts, master classes and competitions are given particular emphasis under the News and the Programmes menus of the new university website, while announcements related to the teaching programme are located on the Notice Board. Those interested in applying to the Liszt Academy will find everything they need under the Application menu – including details of application requirements broken down by department – while the Study menu is primarily concerned with students who have already enrolled, and the menu The University presents the academy itself. Looking deeper into the menu structure, it is possible to find other content, for example, great teachers and students in the Hall of Fame, or the teaching staff of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, as well as pages covering the Doctoral School and Library. Links and banners on the landing page and side bar link directly to the pages giving information on certain high priority projects. Parallel with the launch of the university website, the pages of the Liszt Academy Career Office will also be completed; this is where portfolios of young talented musicians managed by the institution and selected by tender can be found. If, despite the transparency of the website, a visitor is still unable to find what he/she is looking for, the search box with multiple filter parameters will certainly help. Contact details of the website editors and colleagues dealing with student matters can be accessed by clicking on the Contact menu or the appropriate footnote link.

The programme search, news lists and structure and operation of the menu system on the new university website are almost identical to those on zeneakademia.hu. Unlike the old website, all lists and pages are now far more informative, and intros to the regularly updated columns can be easily displayed on the main site, where visitors can quickly scan through them to see if there is anything new of relevance to them. Major articles of long-term interest will be placed on the landing page's lead position or in boxes positioned on the side bar. Naturally, the new university website shares all the advantages that we have already reported on in the case of zeneakademia.hu at its launch in October 2013, in other words, thanks to its open source coded yet sophisticated portal engine it can easily be browsed on all mobile devices and tablets, and can be expanded.