At the end of last semester, renovations started to be planned for the keene.edu website going into the fall. A majority of the changes were made to cater to incoming students and to make sure they would be able to navigate the website and find the sources they need.
Chad Cassin, the director of online strategies at KSC, provided an update about the work that has been done and whether he thinks the improvements have helped make the site more accessible.
“I think they have both in terms of technical appliances and usability,” Cassin said. “And the ability to find things, with the caveat being that we’re focusing right now for this first phase on the enrollment side, then we’ll move towards the other audiences and other content.”
Cassin also discussed the feedback he and his team have received and what they expect moving forward.
“Right now we don’t have enough data to back it up, since we went live at the end of July,” Cassin said. “We were sanding down some rough edges and worked some new content from the old system and new system. But we should, in the next couple weeks, be getting data that should help support the fact it was an improvement. On the plus side we haven’t heard any complaints.”
“We haven’t heard any direct student feedback thus far,” Cassin went on. “We’re always open to it, though. We’ve received some miscellaneous feedback from different departments. Things that were not how they worked in the past. But mostly just technical configuration issues.”
In regards to the departments and teacher feedback, Cassin said they have received mainly positive feedback. He added that he believes the new design has a couple different benefits outside of its main function and that “it gives people a fresh opportunity to review stuff and go, ‘well, maybe we need to see this a little different’ and work on rewriting content.”
Cassin touched upon sections of the website that still need to be updated and changed as well.
“The student life section is one area,” Cassin said. “There’s some areas, specifically around grad studies, that we will be updating. We’ll make continued improvements over time with the academic areas. We’re still hoping to bring in a filter or a search mechanism so people will be able to compare and look at different academic interests they may have. It’s a pretty long list actually.”
Cassin expected that a majority of the changes should be completed within the year.
“I think the final changes will be about 12-18 months, to get everything over,” Cassin said. “Considering the fact there’s about 14,000 pages worth of content right now, I think the bulk of what most people interface with will probably happen within the next eight months, assuming we can get all the configurations with some of these systems we updated working.”
Cassin added none of the issues that have arisen have caused the team any serious drawbacks, as most of them were expected and planned for.
Chloe Erno can be contacted at
cerno@kscequinox.com
