At a time when “telling and selling the story” is a priority, Towson University’s Web site is antiquated and difficult to use, officials admit – but that’s beginning to change.
A small committee, headed by associate vice president of marketing Ellen Stokes, has held several meetings to discuss renovations to Towson.edu.
The group has met with stakeholders, including Student Government Association representatives, to identify the primary purposes of the site. Stokes said the current site has “many glaring weaknesses.”
“Our [task] is to uncover the weaknesses…and find out what else people want from the Web site,” she said.
Towson’s Web sites are accessed by hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. E-mail, enrollment information and event details are among the online resources used by students.
“I think for many students, their instinct is to jump onto the Web site to find [information],” SGA member Leslie Cox said.
Cox and SGA vice president Darcy Accardi surveyed 100 students about their uses of the Web site last month, and presented the results to the committee.
“A lot of students said they [frequently] get lost on the site,” Cox said. “Sometimes there are too many layers to navigate through,” Accardi added.
The students said the site needs a facelift, and Stokes agreed.
“We need to make this happen,” Stokes said.
Two of President Robert Caret’s Towson 2010 action items relate to the Web site. One goal is to “totally redesign our Web presence to better tell the Towson story and to facilitate information retrieval.” Another is to “redesign the Student Affairs Web site to enhance internal communications with students.”
“The webmasters should think like PR publishers,” a user on the Towson 2010 message board wrote last week.
Stokes suggested the site is in need of substantial renovations. She compared it to a house, and said it needed more than redecorating.
“The house needs to be razed and we need to start over,” she joked.
Stokes hopes to align the site to the University’s business and marketing goals.
The backbone of the site is technical. Matthew Wynd, assistant director for information technology support centers for the Office of Technology Services, said his office will most likely commit resources to a redesign effort.
“OTS Web designers and developers created the current home page and many of the linked sites,” he said. “We bring to the table a connection to the OTS department for design, development, and Web site statistics evaluation issues.”
The current site was last renovated by OTS in April 2000.
Andy Bell, a Web designer/developer for the multi-media/Web development unit, said Towson’s three largest Web servers average approximately 350,000 off-campus unique visitors per month. Unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site.
The Towson home page records about 200,000 visits per month. A visit is recorded every time a user requests the page, even if it loads more than once during the month.
TU’s Google search page receives about 20,000 visits per month. But many Google searches relating to Towson result in all-campus e-mail messages from 1999 and 2000, Stokes noted.
“Over the years the site has accumulated things, but it hasn’t shed things,” she said. “People know how to put it up, but they don’t know to how take it down.”
Stokes said TU should consider investing in a solid search tool.
“That [would buy] us a little time for the people who are visiting our site each month and struggling,” she said.
Some parts of the University have moved forward on updating their Web sites. The Administration & Finance division unveiled a redesigned site over the summer. Dining Services also put a new site online.
Cook Library recently unveiled a user-friendly redesign of its Web site. Paul Peeling, the library’s technology manager, said the changes were based on an online survey of the users.
“[People suggested] there was information that would be easier to find in different ways,” he said. “They were saying they’d prefer to have a site that had more links available upfront, without having to go through as many layers.”
|
|
|
| Home | Copyright Brian Stelter |