We Deleted More Than 5,000 Pages From Our College Website. Here’s Why.
Imagine you’re a potential first-generation college student, in search of to attend an establishment of upper schooling in efforts to acquire economic mobility. Chances are your first steps (amongst many) will embody visiting the web sites of faculties and universities of curiosity.
What will you discover in your on-line search?
Well, when you visited the Community College of Aurora’s website previous to May 2023, you’d have found greater than 5,500 webpages of content material. Today, our web site has fewer than 300 pages.
As educators, how can we probably anticipate to extend our enrollments, promote the mission of our establishments, successfully talk our educational choices, and have interaction potential (and present) school college students inclusively with school web sites that perform extra like on-line file cupboards? It is time to cease this foolishness.
Embracing Accessibility by Design
For far too lengthy, school and college web sites have been designed with the belief that revealed info is accessible info. This just isn’t true. Accessible, by definition, means “capable of being reached; easy to speak or deal with; capable of being understood or appreciated; or easily used or accessed by people with disabilities.”
As we mirror on accessibility, there are two sides to this coin greater schooling should account for, figuratively talking. First, it’s crucial for faculty web sites to embrace the duty we’ve got to be inclusive with all digital content material for people with a incapacity, as outlined in Colorado House Bill 21-1110. Second, and the principle matter I’m discussing right here, faculties have a duty to make sure their web sites mirror the inclusivity they often communicate of. Not simply with pictures of scholars of coloration and different identities smiling round their campuses, however by growing content material utilizing sources just like the Flesch Reading Ease Score to help readability for the various communities we serve.
Over the span of 1 12 months, Community College of Aurora requested 4 important questions of our web site’s effectiveness and accessibility. First, who’re we serving? Second, who’s our desired viewers? Third, what’s the info this viewers wants? Fourth, how are we making info accessible to this viewers?
In deep consideration of those questions, we found that our web site was not a “front door” reflection of our school’s vision statement: We aspire to be the faculty the place each scholar succeeds.
Centering Students
Pedagogically, educators are taught to plan, train, and assess studying across the wants and skills of scholars. Student-centered learning, as it’s recognized, supplies educators a framework to position the wants and uniqueness of every scholar on the middle of the tutorial expertise. Such an method empowers educators to design student-centered establishments.
However, the lead query I pose is, do your school and college web sites mirror student-centeredness? Can guests successfully navigate your web site to call to actions that promote a seamless digital expertise that in flip promotes a sense of belonging? If not, now could be the time to do one thing about it.
It will not be simple. When the Community College of Aurora a number of years in the past acknowledged the necessity to overhaul its website, an array of challenges prevented the work from occurring. At one level, our school made the choice to vary distributors and begin our efforts throughout from scratch. Why? Because our administration got here to know and worth the necessity for our establishment to companion with a web site developer that finest represented the dynamic and progressive method our school is in search of to serve our college students.
Blair Lee, my school’s govt director of strategic communications and alumni relations, served as venture champion for our web site redesign. As Lee shared with me, “Completely overhauling our institutional website was no easy lift, it required a significant amount of departmental cross-collaboration to ensure all the necessary stakeholders were at the table to have their voices heard and validated.”
But we knew the hassle can be worthwhile. Lee additional expressed, “The goal was to build a site that at its core would be used as a tool to drive enrollment, streamline communication, engage current students and would be a ‘digital utopia’ that told our story to site visitors beautifully.”
The method we took, he added, “made certain that those who would be impacted had an opportunity to give their input prior to going to launch.”
Defining the Purpose of Our College Website
Through analysis and engagement, I used to be in a position to acknowledge as school president that our web site was wrongly trying to be all issues to all folks. Our present college students, potential college students, and their dad and mom have been having to navigate a monstrosity of knowledge and we (the faculty) have been simply hoping the knowledge was accessible.
Data confirmed that guests to our former web site spent a mean of 30 seconds every go to. Remarkably, since going reside with our new web site, guests are actually spending three minutes and 15 seconds on common navigating our web site. In addition, our redesigned website has seen a 15 p.c enhance on our “apply” webpage, which for our establishment primarily operates as an inquiry database.
“College websites were important before the pandemic. We counted on them to provide access to information and services. Post-pandemic, instead of access, websites are drivers of action,” says Clair Collins, vice chairman of enrollment administration and pathway success at my establishment. “As the ‘first look’ option for most students, websites are now the primary method schools [use to] generate leads, communicate their mission and vision, and drive engagement. To capture student information and maintain healthy enrollment, a strong web presence with clear calls to action has become vital.”
We have extra modifications deliberate for the longer term, too. Because greater than 50 p.c of our college students are first-generation school college students, greater than 50 p.c are college students of coloration, greater than 30 p.c determine as Hispanic or Latino, and greater than 70 nations are represented at our establishment, it was crucial that our school web site symbolize our proud federal Hispanic-Serving Institution designation. This fall, our school is planning to go reside with a Spanish-only model of our total web site, and efforts are underway to develop and determine a 3rd language navigation.
Now, greater than ever, we’ve got a duty as educators to create curriculum and studying environments that honor and account for the variety of our evolving communities. I hope that our expertise will encourage your establishment to make its digital presence extra welcoming and helpful to your potential and present college students.
