On Beyond Google: Creating the Next-Generation College and University Web Site
College and university Web sites and social media technologies are becoming more and more important in the student recruitment process. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Web site (www.mnscu.edu) is functional, but needs continuous improvement to keep up with advances in technology and the popularity of social media such as video and audio podcasts, blogs, social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others) and other emerging technologies. Traffic on the current, static system Web site depends on prospective students intentionally seeking it out; it is now becoming critical for college and universities to be more interactive and to use new technologies to reach out to students to pull them to our site.
The current system site also needs streamlining and segmenting by its various user groups – prospective students, counselors, job-seekers, employers, media and others. To make the public Web site clearer and easier to navigate, the internal parts of the site need to be segregated so that visitors do not encounter large volumes of internal information that may be out of date and irrelevant.
This project will complement the PRYNSIS program search function revamp already approved by seamlessly integrating it into the Web site in a manner that is consistent with the system’s brand. The Web communications coordinator has been and will continue to work with the Academic and Student Affairs unit that is working on the PRYNSIS project.
The main objective of the project is to increase clarity, make the Web site more visible and easier to navigate, and to enable the use of new technologies that engage prospective students. This requires restructuring the Web site into public and internal portions. Information now is available that is not relevant to students or most other external users. Currently, with little or no segregation of public and internal information, the huge amount of information is too large to keep up to date. As a result, public visitors, including prospective students and those who influence them, are likely to have difficulty finding the information they need because of the current structure and large volume of information.
