The new Hillsdale.edu features a completely new design.
Brad Lowrey | Courtesy
For the past 12 months, Hillsdale College’s website Hillsdale.edu has been getting a facelift. After a year of updates and changes, the marketing department said it plans for the site to launch by the end of April.
“The biggest update is everything,” Director of Digital Marketing and Social Media Brad Lowrey said. “The site has been completely reprogrammed from the ground up. Everything from the backend server architecture through pages and design and content. Everything has been overhauled. So when we say that it is a new site, it is, down to the ones and zeroes, brand new.”
It looks “nothing” like Hillsdale’s current website and features about 700 pages of content, Lowrey said.
Just a part of several important updates, the new homepage will feature “hero areas” with which the marketing department can fill any type of content, from videos to photos to infographics.
President Larry Arnn said the Internet is “crucial” to admissions and all forms of marketing as well as to Hillsdale’s relations with the people it serves. For this reason, Arnn hired Lowrey and Vice President of Marketing Matt Schlientz over a year ago to begin the process of updating Hillsdale’s website.
“The mission of the college commits us to study the proper subjects of the liberal arts here on the campus and to make that activity known to others,” Arnn said. “‘Sound learning’ is necessary to the perpetuation of ‘civil and religious liberty.’ The website will give anyone who wishes knowledge of what that liberty is. It will provide a way for anyone who wishes to participate in the work of gathering that knowledge of keeping it alive.”
Hillsdale’s marketing department is working with the marketing and communications firm Lipman Hearne throughout this process. Before beginning work on the updates, the marketing department, along with Lipman Hearne, conducted a research project to understand for what specific things visitors to Hillsdale’s website are looking.
“A lot of students, prospective students, and prospective parents were asked about it, and that has helped influence the way we have designed the information architecture and the navigation. Things will be easier to find,” Web Content Manager Kokko Tso said. “The site is certainly much more alive, more vivid. The colors are happy. Hillsdale is a happy place, and I think our site does a much better job of highlighting that and bringing Hillsdale College to life in a digital format.”
Several goals came from that research project.
“We’re looking to improve the experience for all audiences across all devices. We’re trying to improve the efficiency of navigation and the structure of the site,” Schlientz said. “We’re trying to provide a modern and engaging interface, a foundation for great content, trying to reduce site clutter, be more visual, bring more photography into the site, as well as videos and infographics. And the site needs to be responsive.”
To achieve this, the new Hillsdale.edu will be fully mobily responsive. Over 30 percent of the traffic on Hillsdale.edu comes from a mobile device, Lowrey said. The college has optimized the new site for display on any sized phone, tablet, and computer.
“If you’ve been on a non-mobile optimized website, it’s a lot of zooming and dragging and zooming and sliding, so having the ability to have that all optimized for mobile devices is fantastic,” Lowrey said.
Another major goal for the new website is that it will serve the needs of Hillsdale’s entire audience, not just current and prospective students.
“It’s not just serving prospective students and prospective parents, it’s serving our current students, faculty and staff, our alumni, our current donors, our millions of subscribers to Imprimis, over a million now who have taken an online course, and our other supporters and fans from around the country,” Schlientz said. “Over 100,000 people visit the site on a monthly basis, over a million visitors per year, so it’s a significant communications vehicle for the college.”
“We’re trying to differentiate the college from our competitors, and we’re competing with the best in the country,” Schlientz said. “We needed a website infrastructure that serves as a hub for the many audiences that we serve.”
The new website will be easier to update, as well.
“We’ve really worked to make it a living, breathing kind of a thing, so if you came to the site six months from now or a year from now, there’s likely going to be things that are different,” Lowrey said. “We will have a lot more data than we did before, so we can see how people are using it, what features they’re clicking on, what things that they’re using the most, and we’re able to do testing.”
Several other important new features of the site include an improved majors and minors program browser, a new faculty browser, more alumni features, a social media hub, and a “completely overhauled” events calendar.
“As we get more embedded with the various departments and start talking with them on a very regular basis, this calendar will be a very robust reflection of everything that goes on here on campus,” Lowrey said.
Lowrey said it will take the “entire campus” to maintain the new site.
“One of my favorite parts about this entire process has been working with all of the different departments and faculty,” Lowrey said. “This is a campus-wide team effort in a lot of ways.”
