Discussion on the development of a new web site for St. Louis Community College. There is discussion on a need for discovery. What do students want? They contracted with a vendor to perform research on needs and desires. There were also many discovery sessions internally with content contributors and staff.
As many have found, students want access to registration, resources, schedules, course management system (Blackboard) and the college catalog (I read this as meaning students want info on programs offered). Biggest issue discovered in research is that students can’t find what they’re looking for.
They had an Ad Hoc Web Advisory Committee looking at navigation, structure, organization, and prioritizing inclusions for the first phase, and learning how other institutions handle these needs. It was attempted to contract out content development but ran into trouble with vendor not understanding the intricacies of the college. Currently they are beta testing of the new site internally, with students and prospective students.
Campus pages provide flavor for a campus and provide a separate newsroom in the separate news application. We could add our newsfeed on each campus web page reusing existing news content.
Mention of a home-grown continuing education registration component. I’ll have to look into this as we also struggle with this and haven’t seen a good model yet.
The focus is on the prospective student.
New site rolled out with 1,600 pages; started with 16,000 page site.
www.stlcc.edu
For presentation: www.stlcc.edu/presentations/