Our little darling just turned one! On Saturday, August 15, CI's mobile-friendly responsive web site celebrated its first birthday, and we sure are proud of it.

It's been a great first year with our site. Here's what we have to show for it:

13% increase in pageviews of the CI web site overall
27% increase in pageviews of the About CI page
41% increase in pageviews of the Academics page
65% increase in pageviews of the Visit Campus and campus tours pages
69% increase in pageviews of the main Admissions page (Admissions & Costs)
145% increase in pageviews across all Admissions pages
468% increase in pageviews across all tuition and fees pages
1421% increase in pageviews of the Student Life page

...and other significant increases across academic and administrative web sites...

...and a 29% decrease in our bounce rate and a 39% decrease in exit percentage across all primary CI web site properties.

What do all these stats mean? They mean that more people are visiting the CI web site, and people are engaging more deeply with our web content.

If that wasn't enough, our web site was also recognized with 3 awards:

2014 Collegiate Advertising Awards Silver Winner in Website Design
2015 CASE District VII Award of Excellence (Bronze) for Institutional Web Sites (PDF)
30th Annual Education Advertising Awards Merit Award for www.csuci.edu 

Not too bad for a young university in Camarillo CA!

Since we launched, we've continued to make incremental improvements. Some highlights include:

1. Establishing a rapid, rotating refresh cycle for the banner images on the CI home page.
2. Changing the home page banners from static images to clickable images. We'll be keeping track of how this change in functionality increases our visitor interaction.
3. Working closely with our Enrollment Management team to develop and deploy a new consolidated "Calendars" page, which combines events, important dates and deadlines for prospective and incoming students.
4. Integrating new videos to help prospective students, parents and visitors to get to know CI.
5. Migrating all but 3 of our academic program web sites to our new mobile-friendly, responsive web site design, including subsequent re-designs of the Anthropology, Chicana/o Studies, and Nursing web sites.
6. Upgrading our Google Analytics to use Google Tag Manager to help us better manage our web analytics. 

• Migration of our Giving, Extended University and Library web sites to our new mobile-friendly, responsive design
• An updated electronic campus tour and viewbook
• Updates to the Housing and Dining web sites
• Migration of CI-developed web applications that are still using our legacy web framework.

As I mentioned in the previous post, building a web site is a lot like building a home.

The process first starts with identifying requirements. Requirements define what the end result will have (or won't have), and determine how much time and resources you can spend.

From there, a blueprint which incorporates the requirements is developed; it shows how the requirements come together, relate to one another, and provide a first look at how users will navigate the end result.

The CI Web Refresh Core Team and Stamats have wrapped up the requirements for the new CI site (as outlined in the executive summary shared in a previous post), and are now working on a new "blueprint". This process is formally known as information architecture (IA), and includes the following activities:

• defining what kinds of spaces are necessary on the updated site, based on the requirements outlined in our strategy; 
• determining the naming/labeling of the spaces;
• organizing the spaces and showing how they relate to one another; 
• visualizing how people will move through the spaces; and 
• confirming that the spaces and their labels make sense to their users.

This week, key stakeholders from Admissions & Recruitment, Alumni, Academic Affairs, University faculty, Extended University, and Student Affairs are meeting individually via conference call with our strategic partner Stamats as well as members of the Web Refresh Core team to review findings and recommendations for their respective areas.

During these meetings, we are reviewing institutional goals, project objectives, core assumptions and guiding principles for the project. In addition, we are outlining key priorities, time frames and next steps related to each group.

One important theme re-iterated throughout these meetings is that while we strive to improve communication to all visitors to the CI web site, the focus for this project is to improve communication to prospective students first and foremost. This is necessary to ensure that the limited resources available for this project are focused on addressing our institutional goals, as listed in the strategic brief executive summary, available in PDF format.

Speaking of focus, redesigning a web site is a lot like building a house: most of the time, you can't design or build a house on an unlimited budget with unlimited resources. You've got to work within your means and you've got to have a good plan. Fortunately, all of the research and strategy work we've done so far have given us a good plan.  In our next installment, we'll share how our team is starting to build the blueprint for the new CI web site.

The blog has been quiet, but only because we've been doing a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes in preparation for the next phase of our project, which will continue into fall 2012.

Our partners at Stamats came to campus on May 2 and 3 to meet with students, faculty, and other key campus stakeholders. During their visit, the Stamats team met with 46 students, faculty and staff to discuss their perceptions of the University and their needs and concerns about the CI web site.

Since their visit, the Core Team has been working closely with Stamats to review their findings and to refine the strategies and vision that will shape both this refresh project as well as the University's strategy for web communication for the next several years. The findings and recommendations have been documented in detail in a 73-page strategic brief.

We are very pleased to share a 5-page summary of the findings, in PDF format (219KB) (to view, download Adobe Acrobat Reader). The findings and corresponding recommendations affect so many areas of the University, so it's important that this new vision is shared, discussed and embraced by the University community.

We'd love to answer any questions you have regarding the vision, findings, and recommendations as described in the summary. Please post your questions or comments here, or email them to Peter Mosinskis at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu.

The Core Team is continuing to work with Stamats on scheduling for the next phase of the refresh process, during which Stamats, the Core Team and select stakeholders will work to review and develop an updated information architecture for the University web site. More about information architecture in our next post.