Do you need to know how to change your address for Cornell's records, cover your newborn child under your health plan, take a course in leadership skills or hire a new employee? The answers are on the Human Resources Web site, which will be much easier to navigate after winter break.

The Division of Human Resources will launch a major redesign of its site Jan. 4. The new design will update the look, improve the navigation and highlight areas of most current interest.

Over the past several years, as the HR division expanded its services and programs, its Web site has grown to nearly 1,000 pages and become unwieldy and hard to navigate. Its design, crafted before the Cornell main page was redesigned, is not well integrated with the rest of the Cornell site.

Redesigned in partnership with University Communications, the new "Welcome to Human Resources" site will be streamlined to one-third its current size. Built with the user in mind -- whether a prospective employee, newly hired faculty or staff member, manager, family member or retiree -- the new site's key topics have been chosen based on feedback from across campus, usage analysis of the current site and user testing.

Some of the most notable changes to the Web site:

An e-mail will be sent Jan. 4 to the Cornell community to announce that the site is live; it will include redirects for those who have bookmarked current commonly accessed pages.