Month 1 Checkup

June 22, 2018

Published in: feedback, waves

In one short month, our new website is attracting more students than ever before and exceeding quality standards.

1,454 New Leads

New visitors are coming to our site. They learn, they trust and they complete a request more information form. A prospective student (lead) is born.

Since launch, our undergraduate leads are up 84% and graduate leads are up 52% from the same period last year.

A tool called Siteimprove is helping us flag issues. It’s working. We’re exceeding industry standards in all areas.

Site Scores

	Industry Standard	Old Site	New Site
Quality Assurance links, spelling, readability	78.1	73.0	98.3
Accessibility alt text, PDFs, HTML	68.2	64.1	94.5
SEO meta descriptions, speed, word count	72.6	62.3	84.5

We’re working through the improvement phase of Wave 1.

In-depth user testing is scheduled for July. We’ll work with five prospective students and five current students to assess their ability to complete top tasks.
We’re generating behavior maps for 10 high traffic pages. These maps “heat up” to show how users interact with pages.
Campus feedback and analytics help us know where to make adjustments. Some things you may have noticed:
- Employee Self-Serve HRMS in now in the logins list.
- Text on the home page looping video moved up so it doesn’t cut off on most screens and less aerial footage is in videos (it made some people sick).
- Search continues to improve. We can see on the back end what you aren’t finding and are fixing items one-by-one

The goal is to have Wave 2 launched before the start of the fall semester. Tentative go live dates are as follows:

July 25 – Leaders in Action (new story-telling site)
July 27 – Med
August 6 – Law
August 7 – CoBPA
August 8 – Honors, Essential Studies, International Center, Grad School, Registrar
August 13 – Education