Best of CASE District III Award
 

Institution: Randolph-Macon College

Title of entry: Randolph-Macon Website Redesign

About this entry: In coordination with the launch of a new brand strategy, we took on a full and comprehensive site redesign, concurrently address significant technology and content obstacles:

1. An aging site infrastructure on a CMS platform that had become available to far-too-many publishers, creating a complex governance challenge with text-heavy pages that often included redundant information and hundreds of long-forgotten pages.

2. A 14-year-old UX, with many years of competing college priorities muddying site navigation for our priority audience: prospective students and their families.

Our plan for rethinking the site was coordinated with the college’s first-ever brand strategy and full creative identity. The projects occurred nearly concurrently; as the brand work was in development, we began planning for the migration of rmc.edu to WordPress. We re-engineered the information architecture, with guidance from an internal committee. We redesigned and rewrote all major landing pages and added new ones. We collapsed hundreds of low-content pages into longer, more robust pages. We selected new imagery across the site, migrated 1000+ news stories with a new category and tagging system, and added a comprehensive event calendar to replace a non-mobile-friendly calendar that was poorly utilized.

The site’s launch has coincided with a significant uptick in key admissions metrics, including a 30% increase in campus visits, a 27% increase in applications, and 37% increase in deposits YOY. In comparison with old site data, we've observed huge improvements in our bounce rate, a 15% increase in web inquiries and 15% improvement in engagement time on the site.