By the time they reach college, most students are familiar with the toil and difficulty that comes with navigating a college website.
Amid all the business of senior year of high school, one of the most influential factors in the selection of a college is the design of its website according to a study by Robert Morris University. OCU has decided to enact a redesign on the university website for this reason, making information more available and easier to follow, according to the university tech staff.
Since the beginning of this semester, OCU’s web division has been working to program a new, updated version of the university website. A ground-up restructuring of the templates, layout and aesthetic has been planned, and among its new features are mobile compatibility, a modified content management system and an overall reworking of the interface.
“It’s the entire site, so everything will have a new look,” said Leslie Berger, senior director for university communications. “It’ll actually be a drastically different look, drastically improved.”
As well as taking a generally modernized approach to the website, the OCU web division has not been working alone. In order to make the redesign as sharp as possible, they’ve been collaborating with an Oklahoma City-based company, Staplegun Advertising, to update the site with all the best possible efficiency. It only benefits the process that a number of OCU alumni work at Staplegun, making the business-based partnership a more personal and involved process, Berger said.
“It’s been really cool to collaborate with them because they have a vested interest in the university,” Berger said.
The design process was done under the guidance of research and surveys. Prospective and current students were interviewed, and their answers were used to inform the choices made by the team.
Many students are encountering difficulties with the site’s previous format.
“I’d really like it to have a clearer layout of what the freshmen need to use, especially for applications and the beginning of school,” said Hannah Mansfield, acting freshman. “I didn’t even know what D2L was until the beginning of the first week.”
With at least three years of dust atop the current university website, it’s time for an update. Due to the incoming influx of high school seniors, the new site is scheduled to launch in October.
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