After months of running analytics and patching holes in its new website that was launched last September, the college decided to introduce changes to the current site. A rebuild of the admissions page will be the first phase of rebuilding all sections of the current website.
President Larry Arnn approved plans that were submitted by Kraig McNutt, associate vice president for digital and new initiatives, and Web Content Manager Kokko Tso. McNutt and Tso have been the primary people working to get the new website up and running.
“Kokko and I had to peek behind the curtain of the current website and determine if what was there was sufficient to meet our needs,” McNutt said. “We came to the conclusion that it was not the best foundation to build upon for a long-term strategy, especially from a mobile and tablet optimization point of view.”
Revamping the website will be a process taken in chunks over the next few years, but they have placed priority on the undergraduate portion of the website — admissions and academics. Their focus is making the website user- friendly and maximizing use of the admissions database, McNutt said.
“We want the website to be the best possible tool it can be with a fresher design that is easier to navigate, more engaging content, and, over time, has better integration with the databases that admissions uses everyday to store prospective student information,” McNutt said.
A driving force behind creating the new website is mobile and tablet optimization — a consideration that was not included when the current website was designed two years ago.
“Right now, the amount of traffic that we are getting from mobile devices should be about twice what it is, simply because when you look at what the industry stats are showing in terms of percent of overall traffic from a college like ours. The reason it’s not higher is that our site is not optimized for mobile and tablet use, and that is a major driver of why we are making changes,” McNutt said.
They will be using a technology called Responsive Web Design, “the next great wave in the digital world,” Tso said. It factors in varying screen sizes, and it is the same technology that companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon use.
“We will include a graphical design, coding design, and an information architecture design that is built with mobile devices in mind,” Tso said. “The two important things are thinking of screen size and optimizing for the mobile user who is not necessarily looking to read something for very long.”
Ongoing improvement will last a couple years, but they will also have to keep checking back on the changes they have made. The task is made more difficult with the quantity of information and the number of constituents they are trying to serve.
“There are so many types of users, which makes it very difficult, and also challenging and fun when you redesign your website. You have to look at it from the point of view of different types of users,” McNutt said. “For just admissions alone, you have prospective students, prospective parents, guidance counselors, military students, international students. All those have varying needs when they come to our website.”
McNutt, who has 20 years of digital marketing experience, came to Hillsdale last June. He said that rebuilding the website is not uncommon for schools around the country.
“What we are going through is very typical of what almost every school goes through. Some went through it five years ago, some still are not going through it,” McNutt said. “A majority of school websites are not that great – ours currently is not that great, but we want to fix that.”
Tso hopes that consistent reevaluation of the website will ease the process for the future.
“The idea is that we won’t wait every three years to massively change the website,” Tso said. “It will be an ongoing patching and updating, so we will be able to gradually ease the fish into the water rather than dunking it into cold water every three or four years.”
