Earlier this month at HighEdWeb’s Integrated Marketing Academy, I asked workshop participants to raise their hands if their institution had two sets of academic pages — one at the top level and one at the department level. Hands crept up. Eyes rolled. Groan. Sigh. Groan.
Education institutions come to this state honestly. No one starts out wanting to have duplicative website content. But enrollment and timeline pressures, coupled with differing sensibilities about the content for those pages, often result in redundancy. The marketing or admissions team creates academic program content at the top level of the site for prospective students, while academic departments maintain academic program pages for, well, everyone within their own site. Detente.
Messiah College has taken a different approach. Director of Web Communications Kris Hardy (krishardy83) explained its setup to me:
I think the approach is brilliant!
Kris told me that, at one point, Messiah had two levels of academic program pages. The college undertook this project in order to better serve prospective students. Snippets from that conversation:
We wanted to ensure students were having a consistent experience when viewing academic content on our website. Prior to the project, depending on how a student accessed our site, they could potentially see two totally different sets of academic program content.
We were letting our backend workflows and departmental structure dictate how we structured content on our website. We were doing what was easiest for us, not what was easiest for the user.
One goal for the project was to break down the barriers around academic content and totally rethink how to provide the best possible user experience for our online guest.
A very important part of this project was the research. We do an annual survey to prospects, with around 400 people responding each year. We focused on academics this particular year. We asked students to rank the importance of several things— they ranked quality of academic facilities, for instance, as the second most important thing for them. Conversely, faculty were pushing video, but video came in last in terms of content that they were looking for relating to academic programs.
We used our research to back our recommendations for the project and presented it to the provost and deans. We also put an advisory team together — one faculty member from each school, and some people from enrollment management and marketing as well.
We knew we’d have some pushback, but the research was really compelling. The advisory team and the deans had some great feedback that led to further improvements to the project.
It took four months to execute the plan once we got final buy-in.
We’ve got a great team here. Four of us spearheaded the project and invested a lot of time in it this past summer. The content team did a great job working with faculty members to fill in any missing content that was needed for the new site structure.
Project team:
Danielle Ran – Director of Communications
Erin Bray – Marketing Communications Writer
Ramona Fritschi – Web Services Manager
Kris Hardy – Director of Web Communications
Traditionally, most schools manage content ownership at the sub-site or page level. Since we wanted to create a shared governance structure for our content, we needed to look at content ownership at a micro-level. For example: in the URL below, the department is responsible for the opening paragraph, but the marketing office (with some help from the career center) manages the career and grad school listings.
We are able to do this by housing some content in a database that is dynamically pulled into a page. This allows content editors in the academic departments to have access to their pages, but restricts them from editing the content that is dynamically pulled from a database.
Everyone is an expert in their field. Listen to each other’s expertise and take everyone’s feedback into consideration.
Faculty love research! Having the research to back our recommendations made things go much smoother.
We just launched the new department sites a few weeks ago, so I haven’t dug into the metrics a great deal. The biggest immediate result is the peace of mind that we can control what students are seeing, however they choose to access our site.
All academic department sites would have the following content categories to ensure that prospects are able to quickly identify the content that is important to them.
The office of Marketing and Communication created standardized widgets for each of the pages above to ensure consistency in the user interface across all academic department sites.
Check out Messiah College’s web resource site or Messiah’s academic program page model .
Voltaire Santos Miran EVP, Web Strategy I've developed and implemented communication strategies in education for more than 20 years now. I think my team at mStoner is the smartest, funniest, and coolest group of colleagues ever, and I can't imagine being anywhere else. Except Barcelona. Or Paris. Or Istanbul. To quote Isak Dinesen, "the cure for everything is salt ... tears, sweat, and the sea."