Kevin Butler
Equinox Staff
The Keene State College marketing and communications staff is underway on a new website design to make it easier and more effective for students, faculty, and the community.
The KSC school website, keene.edu, will have a facelift over the next year-and-a-half, making the site easier to navigate and use overall.
“We’re doing a full redevelopment and redesign to the keene.edu site,” Chad Cassin, online communications manager at KSC, said. “It’s a soft time table; the more we discover, the more we know. The whole discovery and design phase will be finishing in January, and then it’s going to be 12 to 18 months putting together the different pages and sections.” Cassin said the current format of the site is about eight-years-old, and how it is still changing as they discover more technology and information.
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Cassin stressed how time-consuming is a project like this, noting how technologies are constantly changing. “It can be incredibly overwhelming, especially in parts like financial aid, when that deals a lot with things like government forms,” Cassin said.
Communication between students, faculty, staff, and the community will also improve with this new website.
“There’s going to be ample opportunity to buoy stories about the college in the restructured site,” Eve Alintuck, director of marketing and communications at KSC, said. “It will be both more interactive for the user and more intuitive for the people. I don’t anticipate any stories being left in the lurch.”
Alintuck explained that as far as the posting of stories, news, and events, it is up to students or faculty to communicate the nature of their event to her and her staff.
She said this news can be sent through e-mails, other web forms, and sometimes word of mouth, but otherwise they might not make it to the site.
Stories will also be more easily found and will be categorized so site visitors can find what they are looking more much easily.
“Stories can be tagged to belong to a certain section or major,” Cassin said. “It will make it so the tasks are easier to do. We want people to get on the website, find what they need, get it done, and get off of it.”
Cassin added to that thought and mentioned how the way information is listed will change as well. “The site will have less of what we think people want,” he said. “We’re going to start looking at what they actually search and we’ll start putting those pages up front.”
Both Cassin and Alintuck mentioned a “user-centered” design model, which allows the user to control his or her searches more easily, and find what they need quicker and more efficiently.
“The user-centered model is something that will make it easier to Keene State College and the community around us,” Alintuck said. “This new format will help drive people to the actionable tasks on the site, allowing them to find what they are looking for a lot easier.”
As Alintuck said, the site is used by students, faculty and the community, and one student, like many of us, has had his ups and downs with using the website.
“I think it’s pretty easy to use,” senior JT Galloway said. “I can navigate it pretty quickly and everything is easy to find; if not, the search bar is very effective.”
But Galloway also had some issues with the site and said, “I think it could be better with conveying the college, maybe from a social standpoint, such as sports and outside activities, even with things like frats and clubs. I know there are special pages for that but you really have to search for them.” Galloway also added, “The front stories are usually pretty vague and kind of lame. They don’t really grab my attention.”
Technological advances are always occurring and Alintuck pointed out that how people use technology has changes drastically year to year, and overall in the past 10 to 15 years. She mentioned how about 10 years ago, if someone was reading a story online they would click on a link, read the story by scrolling down, and how nowadays everything is tabbed and there are hyperlinks. “Things on the new site will be rewritten in a way that is easy and approachable,” she said.
Cassin also admitted that some of the term on the site, like bursar’s and matriculated, are a type of in-house jargon that found its way out onto the site.
“Like any group these words and phrases are things we just get used to using and seeing that when they are out there we sometimes miss them,” Cassin said. “We will be changing how things are labeled, and will use more common languages and less internal language.” Cassin added they are going to drop many of the acronyms all over the site to make it more user-friendly and understandable.
Overall, the site will be more people-friendly and useable, a serious update from what the site is now. The staff is working hard to get information for everybody on the site. “The right information is different from person to person,” Cassin said.
Kevin Butler can be contacted at kbutler1@ksc.mailcruiser.com.