When Stanley T. Wearden was still considering whether or not to take a job as provost at Columbia College Chicago, he did what most prospective students do when weighing college choices. He turned to the Internet.
What he found at colum.edu earlier this year wasn’t encouraging. The college specialized in the arts, but its 2007-vintage website “didn’t look creative at all,” he says. It was hard to find things amid the jumbled navigation, and it felt dated.
Columbia is struggling to attract students. Its enrollment, now 9,442, has dropped by 24 percent since 2008. The recession was probably the main culprit, but the college’s website clearly wasn’t helping.
The website didn’t dissuade Mr. Wearden from taking the job. In fact, the college was already in the process of revamping its web presence. Columbia, like a number of colleges looking to appeal to students in an increasingly competitive enrollment environment, decided that redesigning its website had to become a high priority. These new sites are stripped down, designed to be used on mobile devices, and aimed straight at prospective students. They make the static, omnibus websites still in use at many colleges look terribly out of date—which they are.
The new Columbia website made its debut in September, and inquiries from prospective students coming through the site have already increased by 82 percent over last year. Other web-traffic statistics indicate that the site is capturing—and holding—their attention.
Colleges with relatively stable enrollments may not be feeling the pressure to update websites they have redesigned within the past seven years, but that’s an eternity for technology and teenagers. About 77 percent of college-bound high-school seniors say college websites are the most influential resource in their search, according to a survey conducted this year by Noel-Levitz, a consulting firm. Of the 1,000 prospective students surveyed, 67 percent said a college’s website affected their perception of the quality of the institution. Forty percent said they did almost all of their browsing with a mobile device.
It may be that enrollments at many colleges are stable not because of their aging, catchall, desktop-only websites, but in spite of them.
Lean and Clean
Administrators at Columbia had been talking about a new website as long ago as 2011 but made little progress until last year, after funding for the project was confirmed. With help from iFactory, a web-design company, the team in charge of the project started gathering ideas from administrators and faculty members and conducting research among potential users. What it found led to the adoption of a few key principles, increasingly common among college websites.
The new website’s home page would be aimed at only one audience: potential students. Since the home page often creates the first impression for not only the site but also the entire institution, it is the logical place to speak to prospects, says William L. Vautrain, director of digital and online strategy at Columbia.
The new home page would provide clear and easy access to what that the team’s research found potential students wanted most: information about programs, admissions, and financial aid. That information, he says, was “completely hidden away” on Columbia’s old site.
The new website would be designed with mobile browsing in mind. About half of four-year colleges now have mobile-optimized websites. With the continued rise of mobile browsing, “it has to be standard operating procedure,” says Stephanie L. Geyer, vice president for web strategy and interactive marketing services at Noel-Levitz. “It’s where the market is.”
The new website would be leaner and cleaner. Trying to make things simple for prospective students, and for mobile-friendly design, means a radically scaled-back site over all. Rather than paragraphs of explanatory text, a few precise sentences would have to do. And much of the content found on many university websites—departmental pages, administrative information, internal information for current students and faculty members (some of it out of date)—would be handled on separate sites or in password-protected areas. Many pages would not exist on the new site at all. The old Columbia website contained about 36,000 pages, Mr. Vautrain says. The new site has 944.
The reinvention of Columbia’s website highlights how expectations of colleges are changing in a new generation.
Discussing the new website during a presentation at the American Marketing Association’s annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, held in Austin, Tex., this month, Mr. Vautrain used two slides to make his point. The way many colleges see their websites was represented by an image of a stately old library lined with tier upon tier of volumes—everything that would fit. The way digital-native prospective students see traditional college websites was represented by an image of a flea market—an overwhelming number of items, most of which are of no interest, organized poorly.
During the process of designing Columbia’s new site, the development team used fictional personae to help determine what each audience would find useful. But one perspective carried more weight than all the others. The prospective-student persona, dubbed “Patrick,” offered insight into not only how the information on the site should be arranged but also what content might be handled on a separate site or left out altogether. Mr. Vautrain says the process of determining what stayed sometimes came down to the question of “Does Patrick really care about that?”
Less Is More
Faculty members tend to care about departmental pages and many other aspects of the traditional kitchen-sink college website that Mr. Vautrain was trying to pare down. On the new site, Columbia professors no longer design the pages of their departments. They also do not publish content to the site or update the program information directly, but rather with the help of Mr. Vautrain’s office.
Columbia College Chicago’s old website greeted visitors with a variety of information meant for different audiences.
While the old website was familiar to faculty members, says Mr. Wearden, the provost, they knew that it “didn’t look ideal.”
Sam Weller, an associate professor of creative writing, says the old site had become a “behemoth,” and that the new site’s “mentality of less-is-more is spot on.”
He says he and his colleagues understand the importance of communicating with potential students as directly as possible, and of building enrollment. He’s confident that any information that faculty members don’t see on the new site, or would like to see, will come. Mr. Vautrain and the web team are “constantly listening to us,” Mr. Weller says.
Both Mr. Wearden and Mr. Vautrain say there is more they want to do with the new site. The home page ushers prospective students toward information about the college’s programs and financial aid, but the sections that serve donors, alumni, and prospective faculty members are rudimentary by comparison. Mr. Vautrain says he faces the challenge of keeping the website’s content dynamic while also keeping it lean.
For now, the “Patricks” whom Columbia wants to attract are coming. And they are tapping on the path laid out by the new home page. Last year visitors spent an average of less than three minutes on colum.edu. Since September they have spent more than 16 minutes there.
