Program pages are among the most-visited pages on postsecondary websites, and it’s no secret that designing informative and engaging program pages can have a massive impact on recruitment. Because we all know this, we obsess over design details and fight the good fight with faculties for better page content. But how are prospects finding your program pages? Because we see high traffic to these pages, we may be overlooking serious gaps in connecting the right students to the right programs.
Laurier’s digital experience team undertook a massive project to update our program filter page (wlu.ca/programs) to better support prospects sifting through 140+ program tiles, deploying a complex filter, adding general categories, removing all photography, and setting up additional tagging and keywording capabilities. This session is an honest case study about how the system was built to function, what it takes to manage it, what works well, and what (surprisingly!) doesn’t work as well as we thought.
Mallory O’Brien
Manager, Content Strategy, Wilfrid Laurier University
Mallory O’Brien is the manager of content strategy for Wilfrid Laurier University’s Digital Experience team. She has two decades of experience in postsecondary communications, almost 15 of which have been in web and digital comms, which began as being a team member for Laurier’s massive website redevelopment project in the early 2010s. She has since been an integral part of driving the university’s digital presence forward through meaningful cross-campus collaborations and innovative user-centred solutions, developing content and editorial strategies for top-level and reputation-critical pages. She is a lifelong gamer and rock climber, and she has recently jumped on the running bandwagon.