Writings on web design and higher education from Missoula, MT

In large institutions, the varying audiences of the website can cause it to pull and stretch in ways that can make the web staff cringe. Site navigation suffers most in this continuous battle to please the on-campus constituents at the risk of alienating your external audiences. Most colleges and universities have moved over to a faceted navigation, allowing prospective students easy access to admissions and residential life while still providing effective information to the news media, donors, alumni and current students. But all is not well with the staff and faculty jump-pages in most instances.

Staff and faculty usually have very strict data silos, and are often quite demanding of having information at their fingertips matching their department’s organization. These users won’t touch your jump pages because they are too generic and don’t meet their needs. Perhaps a universal portal system could take care of this, personalizing the content for the individual; however, these systems are costly and time consuming to build and tailor to faculty and staff needs in a day where student services are the only items on the budgetary menu. The answer is simple: create static department portal page (aka a Poor Man’s Portal).

What do I mean when I say static department portal page? It’s simple, create a basic HTML document that can be housed on a web sever or file share that points to exactly what members in a data silo need. Have them set it as their homepage, so any time they need answers they just pull up a web browser.

The information desk, or admissions office is an ideal candidate for such a simple solution. Every day the staff and student workers answer phone calls with highly creative questions about diverse facets of the institutions policies, people, and programs. One of these static departmental portal homepages in an admissions office could offer a quick redirect to Residential Life room rates, the Registrars Office policy on in-state residency, and scholarships for minorities.

With a couple questions to the staff, and 10 minutes of a web developer’s time, an entire department can have in place a portal that is just as functional as one that would cost many thousands of dollars to implement, and you could even include an email/Citrix/SharePoint login form too. For a 10 minute job, this will save tons of time for those on the front line while providing faster and better support to your students-talk about a return on investment.

If it meets the needs of a large portion of your staff, it could serve as a messaging platform (perhaps most useful with work-study students, who aren’t on the office distribution list.)

I’ll be implementing this type of a project for my admissions office some time soon. I’ll post a follow-up after I see how well it actually works.

There are two major things that prospective students are searching for during their college search: a college and money to pay for it. Every college and university out there knows they have to focus their content on prospective students searching for college admission, specific programs and degrees, and the campus life opportunities that come with life at a college or university; this is the status quo of higher ed websites, and it works well. If an institution wants to stand out in the search results for prospective students’ web inquiries, then they have to think creatively and outside of the standard box.

Most institutions offer scholarships, grants and loans; each of which are thoroughly advertised on their websites in the admissions/prospective students’ pages. This is a good start, getting the content out there in the first place, but taking it the next step can potentially deliver a huge boost in new student inquiries.

Drive students to your scholarship pages through links in targeted academic content. Let students know while they are browsing the College of Education that there is a scholarship available through a link in the sidebar. This will help funnel traffic to your scholarship page and increase your conversion rate as well as passing the PageRank from your academic site to your admissions site and vice-versa, all while building a more definitive keyword presence for your site (a good link for our example page may read “Scholarship for teacher education majors.”) This method takes little to no resources or time, and can be a quick addition to any institutional website.

If you have the resources to go the extra mile, I suggest building additional content in your admissions site about opportunities for scholarship and other methods to pay for college. Prospective students are searching for this content, and right now the private sector is the main cafeteria for what they crave. Even a mid-sized college could challenge giants like FastWeb.com in the search results if they offered keyword rich content that uniquely addressed scholarship programs for each major, ethnic group and income level that the school provides for. Your students will thank you for the resources, and this increase in quality targeted content will bolster web traffic for years to come. Your school probably has all the content written already in the form of flyers, posters and guides placed on the Student Services and Financial Aid department walls.