We are just two days away from unveiling the New Saint Mary’s website. This site will support our enrollment efforts and offer prospective students a new way to see, experience, understand, and — most importantly — choose Saint Mary’s.
This website redesign has been a top priority for the Marketing and Communication team — and the university — and we have been hard at work on it for close to a year. As we launch this week, please know this is a “soft” launch, as is the case with most new websites. There will be bugs; there will be missing images; there will be questions. We have focused the bulk of our efforts on those pages important to recruit students. (We have more than 500 pages on the site.) It has been our goal to launch this completely rethought and redesigned site at a peak recruiting time for our admission colleagues because the primary audience for the site is prospective students. We are tracking things that we already know will need to be fixed or completed, and that continuing work will be completed with a focus on what matters most to prospective students.
Navigation, language, page design, and calls-to-action all have been developed for a strong user experience for our prospective students. Faculty, staff, and current students will be able to find the information they need, but top level pages and information are designed to showcase all Saint Mary’s has to offer a future student … based on best practices and what future students have told us they want and how they search for information. The new site is being launched in our new content management system (CMS), which is WordPress. WordPress is increasingly the system of choice for colleges and universities, is the most commonly used, and is significantly better and easier to use than the earlier custom CMS we had in place.
Over the next few weeks, we will follow up with updates about ongoing testing and changes, and will provide WordPress training to those tasked with updating specific pages on the site. Until then, thank you for your ongoing support of this key enrollment initiative.
