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.

Things are going pretty well with the new site.

This morning we hosted a Web Site Launch reception for about 30 guests, which included most of our team members. After some great introductory remarks and congratulations by Michael Berman, we discussed the  changes and got feedback from our colleagues over pizza. Limited edition CI web site t-shirts were distributed to attendees, and some great photos of the Web Services team were snapped to commemorate the occasion.

Our team continues to squash bugs that are found or reported. We've had some recurring issues on some of the data feeds we use for various components, such as the "Find My Match" feed on the Academics page, as well as the Important Dates & Deadlines on several pages. It's working now but we are still trying to develop a more reliable fix.

We've also have published a page describing the changes to the CI web site. We hope it helps our community understand some of the reasoning that went into the design and information architecture decisions that we made.

Please continue to report all bugs, suggestions (and compliments!) to the T&C Help Desk at helpdesk@csuci.edu or call 805-437-8552.

As of 2:00am this morning, the initial publish was completed, so I'm pleased to announce that the new CI web site is live! Since 6:00am this morning, Web Refresh implementation team members have been checking the 291 pages/sites in migration phases 1A-1D to verify their completion. As of 9:45am, over 94% of those pages have been migrated successfully and are working properly.

In addition, key web applications including myCI, the campus directory, and the Events Calendar were migrated to the new mobile-friendly template this morning by 9:00am.

We're continuing to find and fix minor issues as we find them (or as reported). If you come across any problems or have a suggestion, please email the T&C Help Desk at helpdesk@csuci.edu or call 805-437-8552.

Special thanks to Daniel Martinez, Ryan Garcia, Kevin Craig, and all of the Web Services assistants for their hard work and dedication to make the transition to the new site design as seamless as possible.

Out with the old, in with the new!

We have started to publish the new CI web site to live.

The updated home page is now live. The top-level pages that link from the home page as still in the process of being published.

One little amazing factoid: it was 9 years ago today, August 14 2005, that the previous iteration of the CI web site launched!

We can't believe the time is almost here to launch the updated CI web site!

The Web Services team has been firing on all cylinders, putting the finishing touches on pages across the site, checking, re-checking, squashing bugs, prettifying...In the past few weeks hundreds of bugs have been squashed. Our community of web subject matter experts has done great submitting reports.

Next Tuesday, our team will meet for a final "go/no-go" meeting to make sure we're ready to go live on August 15.

Feel free to look around at our final pre-launch preview, and report any problems or bugs using the "Give us your feedback" link at the top of each page.

Not only is the CI web site launching a new mobile-friendly look and feel, but so is myCI, the campus portal for CI students and employees.

Read more about the changes coming to myCI on August 15...

In the coming weeks after the August 15 web site launch, the Web Services team will be working to update many existing campus web applications with the new mobile-friendly look and feel.

Please contact Peter Mosinskis, Director of IT Strategy, at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu with any questions about forthcoming updates to web applications.

The prep work for our August 15 web site launch is reaching a fever pitch right now.