The problem: everyone on campus has a stake in your website. Certain departments want things structured their own way. Every office expects prospective students to intuitively understand the lingo and hierarchy of the institution. But let's be honest: the data shows prospective students and their parents often search to find what they need (or give up and leave) instead of delving 12 layers deep into your bloated hierarchy.
The solution: move the cheese.
In 2011, St. Mary's University made the bold decision to move away from their proprietary quasi-CMS to WordPress. After a year of hard manual labor, a new site was born. But over time, the site became cluttered. Content became duplicated, even triplicated, because each stakeholder wanted the information in a different part of the hierarchy.
In 2016, St. Mary's made another bold decision: give the website both the visual refresh and the information architecture overhaul visitors needed. By Christmas break, the result was a new site that loaded faster, looked more modern and helped visitors reach key pages in fewer clicks and searches. In this presentation, I will share where the cheese was, what stunk about it and how we created a more sustainable framework for future expansion.
You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/moving-their-cheese-case-study/.
Speaker:
Elaine Shannon
What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.