Instead of a two-day emergency redesign, this site has had a lot more time to develop. Each year, a new set of students is in charge of the event, bringing something new to build upon the base of learned knowledge. This year, the students came up with some design themes, worked with our internal graphic designer to develop printed materials, and worked with me to position the web site properly.
As students without much web experience (short of usage), they focused on design and the visual doo-dads that make a site look sexy but don't really make the site work. I had to bring them back to square one and talk about what they wanted the site to do, who the audience was, why people would come to the site, etc. Then, once we understood that, the biggest challenge became the students' inexperience updating web site. Thus, I built an attractive, useful site that was pretty bulletproof from a maintenance standpoint so that they could add content on their own.