Hillsdale College launched its new website on Sept. 2, beginning a push to improve upon and expand the college’s presence on the web and social media.
The school’s old website was built on software no longer supported by the company that sold it to school, and the replacement of the old content management system prompted a redesign of the website as a whole.
“The aim with the new design is to make the site look more up-to-date and more reflective of what goes on here at Hillsdale,” said Bill Gray, director of marketing. “It’s going to be easier to update and be much more dynamic.”
The site features a new theme over the same basic content as the old design, and the marketing department will organize regular updates to the website’s content.
“The new website is going to be organic, it’s going to be a living, evolving organism.” said Kokko Tso ‘13, the college’s newly hired web content manager. “It’ll always be changing whereas the old website was very much a static thing.”
According to Gray, the website is essential to the school’s efforts to attract potential students and friends of the college, helping people not connected to the school to learn more about it and its mission, while also helping the site run smoother internally.
Current students should not see much of a change to the website’s functionality. The student portal will remain unchanged, and the most-used portion of the website, Mossey Library’s homepage, will remain functionally untouched, Gray added.
The general rollout of the website however has not been entirely smooth. When the new site went live to the internet, all links from Google search results to Hillsdale web pages ceased to work and instead displayed error pages. According to Matt Webber, the web technician responsible for the majority of the new website’s coding, this issue was inevitable.
“These errors were caused because we switched to new servers,” Webber said.
The error messages are caused because Google’s results no longer point to the proper address.
“I’ve submitted pages to Google to reindex, so hopefully that will happen soon,” Webber said.
As Google identifies the new Hillsdale pages and links them to the proper search result, this problem should dissipate. At the time of print, many of the Google links were working properly again.
The website was designed by a group of students led by Bryan Springer, instructor in art, beginning in spring of 2011.
“I assembled design students, and we had a bit of a focus group,” Springer said. “One of the largest challenges and complaints was that as the school grew, the information didn’t have a logical place to go. Information was being shoehorned into the home page.”
Taking inspiration from the websites of schools similar to Hillsdale, they designed a cleaner look while reorganizing the website’s internal structure.
“We outlined what we thought would be a really good improvement, not only visually but structurally as well,” Springer said. “The students really did a lot of the work.”
Gray explained that the newly designed website is part of a larger push by the school to reevaluate and structure its web presence. An internal audit of the college’s social media presence is being conducted, and should be completed with a new coherent strategy by January.
