Session description
The problem: everyone on campus has a stake in your website. Certain departments want things structured their own way. Every office expects prospective students to intuitively understand the lingo and hierarchy of the institution. But let's be honest: the data shows prospective students and their parents often search to find what they need (or give up and leave) instead of delving 12 layers deep into your bloated hierarchy.
The solution: move the cheese.
In 2011, St. Mary's University made the bold decision to move away from their proprietary quasi-CMS to WordPress. After a year of hard manual labor, a new site was born. But over time, the site became cluttered. Content became duplicated, even triplicated, because each stakeholder wanted the information in a different part of the hierarchy.
In 2016, St. Mary's made another bold decision: give the website both the visual refresh and the information architecture overhaul visitors needed. By Christmas break, the result was a new site that loaded faster, looked more modern and helped visitors reach key pages in fewer clicks and searches. In this presentation, I will share where the cheese was, what stunk about it and how we created a more sustainable framework for future expansion.
Presenter
Elaine Shannon
Elaine Shannon is not just a web developer, she loves to look at the whole picture: design, development, content, SEO, user experience, A/B testing and analytics. She first learned about WordPress in 2007 and has been using and recommending it ever since. In her current role, she manages St. Mary’s University’s main website and a handful of microsites, always experimenting with ways to make the web a better place.
Sessions
- General Lecture Session: Moving their cheese: a case study