Wofford.edu gets new look
After almost five years of traffic on the current site, Wofford.edu is ready for a revamped look. The new site, set to launch February 22, aims to be more aesthetically appealing, functional and navigable, particularly to prospective students and their parents.
Annie Mitchell, Wofford’s vice president of marketing and communications, said that the current Wofford.edu site is not truly responsive to the demands of a college website in a number of ways. To resolve this problem, Wofford’s Marketing and Communications department teamed up with the Information Technology department to create a new site that would better serve users of the college’s informative website. As the website can often be the first impression of the college, its effectiveness in regard to relaying information in an organized way is crucial.
Mitchell described the new website, which she says will be more in line with the re-envisioned Wofford brand, as “clean” and “current” with “pictures that pop.” It has been in the works for over a year and is the result of a series of efforts by the design team to run detailed evaluations of the current site and then respond with possible improvements. In order to do so, the team organized focus groups made up of students, faculty and staff who were tasked with assessing various aspects of the website, such as its navigability and format, and then asked to respond to the efficiency of those factors. The site’s demographically diverse users over the past couple of years have also played a role in its evaluation; Mitchell noted that “the longer you live with a site, you realize what you need to do better and improve upon next time.”
After many iterations in the process of creating a new Wofford.edu, Mitchell said the “final” product will be more efficient in a number of ways. As for search functionality, the new site will offer options geared toward specific audiences (such as student, parent, etc). It will also be more visually accommodating based on what type of device it is being viewed from. Drop-down navigation will be another feature of the updated site that is not available on the current site. Overall, Mitchell says the updated site will look like the Wofford brand “in a more cohesive way,” which she refers to as being “brand solid.”
Though Mitchell says she would love to say the implementation of the new website will be free of complications, she admits unexpected kinks in an undertaking like this are inevitable. The internal goal for launching the new website is February 15; Mitchell says this will allow for slight revisions to be made before the more solidified launch date a week later. She added that the design of the new site lends itself to a previously unequalled ease by which revisions can be made quickly and effectively. Given the many aesthetic and functional updates to the site, the new Wofford.edu will, “for prospective students and their parents…feel like Wofford to them,” according to Mitchell.
Caption: Wofford’s current website, Wofford.edu, has been in use for nearly five years. The new site launches Feb. 22.