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Colleges and universities are akin to a small town and serve a vast plurality of people. A college website, being its digital soul, serves a multitude of functions for its many audiences: prospective students, current students, parents, alumni, faculty & staff, donors, employers, research partners, foundations, media, financial institutions, and nearby communities at large. In this blog post, I’ll limit my focus on tips and best practices for user experience design of college websites for increasing enrollment. It all begins with seven essential questions prospective students have User experience is human experience. Prospective students are on their personal hero’s journey. Beyond their personal needs and wants, they have dreams they hope to fulfill, ambitions they wish to achieve, and challenges they aim to overcome. Ultimately, they want to enroll in a college which can give their spirit a fighting chance to blossom and thrive. Let’s assume that a prospective student has just arrived at a college website after gathering preliminary … Continue reading
Posted in: college website redesign, higher education web design
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Olds College of Agriculture & Technology sits in the center of Alberta, at the northern edge of North America’s Wheat Belt, a vast swath of the Great Plains. The school’s Smart Agriculture Ecosystem — with labs, 3,600 acre Smart Farm and researchers — plays an outsized role in advancing a range of digital agriculture innovations designed to sustain Canada’s position as one the world’s largest agricultural producers and exporters. The Olds College leadership team turned to Elliance to translate a new public-facing name and brand position into a full website relaunch focused on clear business goals: Grow the number, geographic reach and diversity of its prospect pool. Increase research funding, industry partnerships, major gift donors. Leverage digital content as a catalytic force to secure non-branded, organic page one Google rankings The Elliance website team prioritized the following site features and outcomes: Transform oldscollege.ca from a quiet enrollment website into a true digital content platform and conversion machine, capable of expanding the reach and … Continue reading
Elliance, a higher education website design and SEO marketing agency, helps universities with redesign and SEO projects. Here is a glimpse of our recent work for UNC Charlotte which resulted in top rankings in North Carolina.
Posted in: college website redesign
Elliance has grown enrollment, endowment and reputation for over 100 colleges and universities including 10 medical schools and healthcare institutions. Samples.
Over the last 25 years, Elliance has developed .edu websites using proprietary, open-source and commercial grade content management systems (CMS). As one of the few technology agnostic agencies, we try and support the prior investments of our clients. However, for medium to large colleges and universities, we recommend Hannon Hill’s Cascade CMS (content management system). Here are five reasons why: 1. Cascade CMS Allows Us to Implement our “Smart Page Builder”. The traditional way to build a website is using page templates. However, when constructing large websites with many schools and departments, Elliance has developed a lego-style assembly of building blocks to create customized pages. We’ve extended the Cascade CMS to construct a “Smart Page Builder” tool which combines building blocks to create all website pages easily and cost-effectively via a single interface. In sharp contrast to template-based websites, this gives our clients the flexibility to create custom layouts as needed for various parts of the website. This dramatically reduces … Continue reading
Over the last 25 years, Elliance has developed .edu websites using proprietary, open-source and commercial grade content management systems (CMS). As one of the few technology agnostic agencies, we try and support the prior investments of our clients. Occasionally, we are asked to make a recommendation on whether to build the higher education website in Drupal or WordPress, especially if the client can’t afford to invest in a commercial grade CMS. Here is our take on this important question. The Origin Story Matters To answer this question, it is important to look back at the origin stories of WordPress and Drupal. At the dawn of the age of user-generated content and the death of authoritative voices, WordPress was started as a DIY blogging platform for everyone. It was designed to be an easy, point-click-and-start-publishing web platform that enabled anyone, irrespective of their technical knowhow, to share their opinions and passions. In contrast, Drupal was created as an open-source content management … Continue reading
Making a business case for investing in a comprehensive website redesign to ROI-minded, quant-driven cabinet members is vastly different than making a case to marketing leaders who intuitively understand the value of a great website. For quantitatively inclined cabinet members, here are five ROI metrics that we have used to justify the investment in a comprehensive website redesign: 1. Better Student Quality: Fortifying program pages and the “why us” pages motivates better-fit students to raise their hands, dissuading wrong-fits from applying. You should expect to see conversion rates improve by as much as 25%. 2. Reduced Bounce Rate: Improving page architecture results in engaged traffic to your website. This should reduce your website bounce rate so it sits between 20% and 30%. The industry average exceeds 50%. 3. Stronger Google Rankings: Baking search engine thinking into every phase of redesign enhances your website’s Google rankings. One year after relaunch, you should see an increase in search engine traffic by 25% … Continue reading
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990/2008 (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 require colleges and universities to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to programs, services and activities. This extends well beyond making sidewalks, entryways and classrooms accessible. It includes websites too. Why has this topic become important lately? Growth of non-traditional student population, people spending as much time in virtual environments as built ones, legislation catching up, and ready availability of assistive technologies are all fueling interest and greater scrutiny in this area. A recent New York Times article covered the story of individuals and law firms from around the country who have begun to make a lucrative business out of demanding compliance from public institutions, and taking legal action against those who don’t. Education Week featured a story about a disability advocate in Michigan who filed 500 complaints with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which is mandated to demand compliance when … Continue reading
In working with over 100 colleges in the last 25 years, we have learned that website projects are a catalyst for transforming a college — stakeholders are aligned, power structures are reconsidered, the organization is energized, a new inflection point is created, and destiny becomes attainable. To realize the true promise of redesigning your website, five essentials are necessary: Wise Strategy Revenue Strategy, Communication Strategy and Search Engine Ranking Strategy are the three building blocks of a Website Strategy. In redesigning your website, these three components must be orchestrated, prioritized and baked into every aspect of development and design. Ultimately, you become the story you choose to tell, and that story begins with wise strategy. Beautiful Design Strategy is invisible. Good design makes it visible. Milton Glaser once said “There are only three reactions to a piece of design: no, yes or WOW! Wow is one to aim for.” We agree. Responsive, mobile first, and beautiful design deepens meaning, delights … Continue reading
In our 20+ year history of building websites, almost all our clients were initially skeptical about the return on investment from a website redesign; they underestimated the impact the new website would have on their business. After a year or two of relaunch, almost all the clients became believers. They shared comments with us that had three recurring themes. Here they are: 1. A great website creates a strategic inflection point, whereby a business starts experiencing a major change due to clarity realized during the website strategy development process. 2. A great website changes organizational trajectory, when a business sheds an old skin and puts on a new skin which re-energizes the prospects, customers and internal stakeholders. 3. A great website realizes a new organizational destiny, whereby the organization musters the courage to unapologetically pursue its vision. We often hear stories from skeptical prospects about their previous website redesigns not liberating prosperity. What’s the difference between their past experiences and … Continue reading