Improving the Top Five High Value Pages of Your Website

2013 EduWeb Conference | Boston
IMPROVING
FIVE HIGH-
VALUE PAGES
OF YOUR
WEBSITE
@thePrimacy | @bigbadjeff | thePrimacy.com 1

If you are tweeting today…
@bigbadjeff
@theprimacy
#eduwebconf

What’s today all about?
Long-term strategy is important
Takes a lot of time
Effectiveness improved significantly by identifying
critical impact pages
We will look at some "high-value" pages and
discuss effective approaches
Focus on tactics that can immediately impact
positive results

Your incentive to
stay until the end…
…because who needs
another iPad!

What do we mean
by “high-value”?
A page, or group of pages,
within the digital experience
that have influence over
some major need or
decision point that will
greatly impact the
relationship between you
and your key target
audiences.

The Premise…
1.Making changes that
require “consensus”
among many people is
difficult
2.Many “stakeholders”
focus on the entry and
exit pages
3. The “middle” contains
pages that are highly
influential in the journey
and decision process
Is this even in
question?
Think: Home Page
and Apply/Give
Now buttons.
And, conveniently,
easier to impact!

Why
High Value
Look in the middle
Home Page Final calls
to action
What How
The battleground areas

Typical Website
Redesign Takes
9-18 Months!
…Once you actually start!

See your life somewhere in here?
Website not
meeting
expectations
Plan for overhaul
Attempt to
accomplish
internally
Meet with groups
around campus
No one can
agree on
anything
Consider hiring
outside firm
Fight for budget RFP process
Put on hold to
wait for new
incoming VP of
Marketing
New VP hired
VP puts project
on hold to
assess overall
needs
Budget
reallocated to
pressing need
Admission and
Alumni teams
scream for help
with the website
New VP secures
the budget
RFP process
Outside firm
hired

See your life somewhere in here?
Website not
meeting
expectations
Plan for overhaul
Attempt to
accomplish
internally
Meet with groups
around campus
No one can
agree on
anything
Consider hiring
outside firm
Fight for budget RFP process
Put on hold to
wait for new
incoming VP of
Marketing
New VP hired
VP puts project
on hold to
assess overall
needs
Budget
reallocated to
pressing need
Admission and
Alumni teams
scream for help
with the website
New VP secures
the budget
RFP process
Outside firm
hired
And
suddenly a
year has
gone by!

Don’t get me wrong!
I love working on
complete redesign
engagements.

Advancement
Academic
Reputation
Admissions
Brand
Community
Influence
Outcomes
But
Here’s
What
Matters:
13
YOUR BUSINESS
GOALS
Get them to
• Be interested
• Visit
• Apply
• Deposit Get them to
• Engage and
connect
• Attend events
• Give
You need to
showcase
• Programs
• People
• Proof
@thePrimacy | @bigbadjeff | thePrimacy.com

Easy, right?

No other category of
website has a
greater range of
relevant target
audiences than a
college or university.
Feel free to tweet this. 

Its easy to oversimplify
http://xkcd.com/773/
Quote just heard from the
audience…
“Ugh, if I have to see that
graphic one more time in
a presentation!”

And…
also easy
to spoof!

Let’s look at the
customer journey

Audience Prioritization
Category Segment
Prospective Students
and Influencers
Prospective Undergrad - Local
Prospective Undergrad – Out of State
Prospective Undergrad - International
Prospective Graduate Student
Parents of Prospective Student
Guidance Counselors
Current Students
Current Undergrad Student
Current Graduate Student
Parent of Current Student
Alumni
Donors
Faculty
Prospective Faculty
Current Faculty
Other Site Users
Media
Community Members
Job Seekers
Other Monmouth Staff
Key
HIGH PRIORITY
MODERATE
PRIORITY
LOWER PRIORITY NOT A PRIORITY
Prioritization Criteria
 Volume of site visitation
 Business objective
alignment
 Site role alignment
Implications
 Budget and effort is
aligned to priority

Develop
personas

The Prospective Student Journey
Stage 1 – First impressions
Stage 2 – Fact-finding
Stage 3 – Visiting
Stage 4 – Applying
Stage 5 – Final decision
Stage 6 – Validation and transition
Helps illuminate
high value
moments in the
process

1
PROGRAMS OF STUDY
MAJORS AND MINORS

Initial priority for prospective students
Prospective Students and Parents
search for programs early in the
process, and often throughout.
Organizational structure forces
programs to be buried when
organized on the website
Current Students are shuffled off to
underserved Intranet.
Surveys / interviews* reflect
sentiment that student
intranet/portals are woefully under
performing.
Students want public-facing site to
serve them as well.
*Noel-Levitz and Primacy primary research

Make it easy to find
Majors and Minors
and Programs of
Study

2013 EduWeb Conference | Boston @thePrimacy | @bigbadjeff | thePrimacy.com 25
Don’t forget the
“undecided”

Don’t forget the undecided

Make it easy to find programs…

…then celebrate them…

…and help them learn more,
connect the dots!

Narrowing the search via filters…

…and easy-to-decode groups

Did I mention “celebrate” the program?
The global
navigation
recedes in
importance.

This gets more complex as you consider
an entire university
Sorts programs
by College and
alphabetically…

This gets more complex as you consider
an entire university
…with visual cues
for degree and
format type

Program Finders allow for broad and
narrow searches
Enables (prospective) students
to search for programs across
all Colleges based on their
status, criteria and interest

An ambitious effort

Show me. Not sure. Surprise me.

Aligned with
the schools
“7 skills for
success”

Guiding thoughts
Don’t make “them” have to figure “you” out.
They don’t care which college, school or department the
program of study resides.
Include one page on your website that lists every major,
minor, program of study.
Good for SEO (internally and externally).
Sets stage to celebrate programs.
Sets stage for “connecting the dots”.

2
VISIT

The campus visit is
a primary inflection
point for selecting
a school
Long understood by every Admissions
Director is the clear fact that getting a
prospective student on campus for a tour
significantly increases the likelihood of
enrollment.
Yet, many websites do little to incent a
campus visit.
A missed opportunity is in building the
excitement around the campus visit before
they arrive.

A few thoughts
Quick Rant!
Why are Apply and Give
buttons everywhere, but
not Visit?
Most Visit pages do a good job at
the “what” and “how”
Serve geo-coded content when
possible
Expand the concept of “the
campus visit”
 Don’t assume they are here to only
schedule an appointment or get
directions
Use opportunity to differentiate
the campus visit

Informational
Experiential
Transactional
Ideally the “Visit” page
is all three

Informational
Experiential
Transactional

Elevate the right content

A Visit section,
versus one long page
Note how they
visually break
up the content.

Campus
Visit page
example:
before
Informational
Experiential
Transactional

Campus
Visit page
example:
after
Informational
Experiential
Transactional

Woven into overall experience

Make the form GREAT!
And
make it
mobile!

Help the planning process

How does one “visit” an online school?

Visit Page
Primary inflection point for college selection
Increase experiential nature on website
Balance between enticing visitors to tour campus
and providing experience for those that cannot
Don’t forget mobile
Find a way to differentiate
Add “Visit” to the footer

3
SOCIAL

Social landscape
challenges
Multiple channels
Some get traction, some
don’t
How many “chicklet” icons
can one page fit?
Value of driving someone
away from your website?

Got social icons on my website? Check.
Are we sending this message?
“Thanks for coming, now please leave”

Pulling feeds in, not pushing away

What a difference a year makes
65@thePrimacy | @bigbadjeff | thePrimacy.com

Social
Hashboard
Pulls real-time feeds from
social media channels
(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)
into one aggregated
destination.

Knowing when not to follow the masses
After scouring
this site this is
the ONLY social
element found.

YouTube: know the changes
Key Attributes:
• Brand channel
• Well segmented top
banner
• Well structured playlists
• Asset naming and meta
data
• Closed-captioning
• Integration across
digital properties
Major SEO
opportunity

See our blog post: http://ow.ly/kTYGp

Instagram

Look outside education for inspiration

Blogs: still alive and well… and effective
Key Attributes:
•Home page
prominence
•Blogger profiles
•Well categorized
•Effective use of
video

Social Media Landing Page
(the Voice of your school)
Embrace channels; test and learn
Integrate with a social strategy, not randomly
Create dynamic feeds with official channels
Include student and faculty blogs

4
TOPICS

Eschew
organizational
boundaries
All schools have topics and
themes that make them
distinctive.
Topics/themes transcend
any one part of the
organization.
Consider ways in which to
“celebrate” your school,
topically/thematically.

Identify unifying topics across campus

…and then celebrate them

I mean really celebrate them

Another robust approach

Which leads to this…

But where’s the main navigation?

Create your own topic mash-up

Topic Pages
Tear down the
organizational barriers.
Create pages that address
key topics.
Use to aggregate access to
content found throughout
the website.

5
NUTS AND BOLTS

404 Error Page
Opportunity for
branding, differentiation,
wayfinding, memorable
moments.

Not really acceptable today…

At least they have something…

Don’t make them go somewhere else

Use as a branding opportunity

Footer
Add high-value page links
for Programs of Study, Visit,
Apply
Reward users that have
come this far
SEO impact
Easy place to tuck your new
topic/aggregator links?

“Let me get this
straight. You want
me to scroll all the
way back to the top
of the page?”

Straightforward and organized

Icons for visual cues

High value tasks prominent

Help with the home page battles?

Robust but lightweight in code

And we haven’t
even talked much
about mobile!

Mobile
Contact / Inquiry
Pages and Forms
Easy to make one-off
mobile versions.

Quick Tangent
Before Finishing…

Using high-value “tasks” as organizing
principle

FINAL THOUGHTS

Think about…
Program Pages
• Celebrate core of what
you offer
• Help them connect the
dots
The Campus Visit
• Inflection point of
selecting a school
Social Media
• Why do we
keep telling
people to go
away?
Topics
• Tear down
organizational
walls
Nuts and
Bolts
• The unsung
heroes

Why
High Value
Look in the middle
Home Page Final calls
to action
What How
The battleground areas

THE
HOMEPAGE IS
DEAD!
LONG LIVE THE
HOMEPAGE!

Avoid the home page battleground

THANK YOU
@thePrimacy
@bigbadjeff
Jeff.Johnson@theprimacy.com

Improving the Top Five High Value Pages of Your Website

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