NSU revamps website; favors tablets, smart phones

Nicholls State University students were greeted with a new website when they returned to campus last week.

“A university’s website is the first stop for students who are shopping for a university,” said Lee Daigle, Nicholls’ marketing and communication director. “We need to make the site as user-friendly as possible. I thought we could do a better job on the website and make it fresh. We wanted a new look and feel at Nicholls.”

The overhaul adopts the school’s latest marketing campaign, “People Creating Possibilities,” which began last fall.

“There are more and more smart phone users these days, and they are used to using icons, the shorter, faster way of getting to specific information,” Daigle explained. “We didn’t want the website to look and feel typical or institutional. We wanted it to stand out.”

With this major point in mind, the university looked at other university sites and corporate websites from all over the country and hosted several focus groups with potential and current students and faculty and staff.

Once all the research came together, the new site’s major elements were decided.

“The site has icons for students to apply, find out what majors we offer, apply for financial aid and schedule a tour,” Daigle said. “These icons will be featured in future recruitment publications. We also have a big splash photo slider. Photos are now the dominant feature of the website. It’s like an electronic billboard for campus. We post reminders, events, display photos of events and put out information. Instead of a boring list of events, this is more visually engaging.”

The site’s visitors will also find that menu items, once along the sides of the site, are now located at the top of the page.

“The new site is more efficient and user friendly,” Daigle said. “There is no clutter. We got rid of things we could do without.”

The revamp work was done in-house by members of the school’s faculty and even several students.

“I’ve actually been planning the new site for a long time,” said webmaster James Planck. “I started thinking about this one after we put the last one up in 2006. I started thinking about the theme and layout and planning the groundwork.”

“When Lee came on (in the marketing and communication department), he had lots of great ideas to freshen things up,” Planck said. “We needed to make the website more accessible for students and staff with smart phones and tablets and let them interface with the site in a way that they are used to. Twenty percent of those who visit our website are using these devices, so we used a responsive design that will enable them to visit the site on different devices.”

“I was the eyes and Jeff was the hands,” Daigle said, laughing. “He brought our idea to life. I joke that we should walk around campus throwing rose petals in from of him.”

The new site launched Dec. 16, but Planck does not expect to see a change in the site’s hits until a few months from now.

“I’ve watched the Nicholls traffic grow since 2003,” Planck said. “In that time the traffic changes were great because of work for search engine optimization. That was a huge change that started in 2006 with huge spikes. Now our traffic has stayed constant. It’s the traffic during specific promotions and events that is really seen. At this point there are other pieces of information that are more interesting.”

“In these reports it is the bounce rate, the exit, and the time on page that it is interesting,” Planck said. “The time on page dropped, meaning less (people are) looking on our core pages. The exit and bounce rate also dropped, so (these two drops) should mean that the visitors may not have read longer, but they didn’t immediately go to some other web address as quickly as before. These are the types of statistics I am hoping we can see changes in since that should mean a more usable website that is meeting the needs for the complex Nicholls audience.”

Although university President Dr. Stephan Hulbert did not have a hand in the redesign of the new website, he is pleased with the results.

“It is a fantastic representation of Nicholls State University,” Hulbert said. “The idea came completely from university staff that really understand web development, and it reflects the needs of young people visiting the site.

“The website is a means for individuals to get access to a great deal of information in an easy format. It’s an obvious window for the university. It’s a broad, external place to learn about Nicholls and what it is all about, and it is delivered in an exciting package that is very easy and fun to use.”