Welcome to the start of another school year! The web team has gone through a number of changes over the summer. First, we’re no longer a part of Information Technology, and are now a component of Marketing and Creative Services.
As part of that change, we’ve had a few personnel changes. First, we’re officially declaring Tom a member of the web team. Tom is a graphic design instructor, who we were fortunate enough to be able to snag as a half-time graphic design analyst. He, and the students he supervises in the Design and Media Center, have already made significant improvements to the look at feel of the website and our communications. David and Jim will be staying with Information Technology. While David will likely continue supporting our servers, Jim will be moving away from doing website content work and entirely into IT tasks. Thank you both for your time on the web team, and welcome Tom!
So what’s ahead?
The last few years, we’ve focused on some simple metrics to try and improve the Lane website. In 16-17 we worked primarily on reducing the size of the Lane website, going from 5768 pages to 5550. In 17-18, we expanded those goals again, but also added two traffic goals. We were successful in reducing the size of the website, dropping all the way to 4532 pages. But we missed our traffic goals, making only minor progress on the bounce rate and missing our session count goal entirely.
Over the last two years, we’ve definitely learned that we do what we measure, so it’s important that our metrics properly reflect our intentions. For instance, one of the ways we were trying to simplify the Lane website was by reducing the number of pages. But one of the ways we met that goal was by cleaning out old training pages. Those pages probably aren’t why the website feels cluttered, but deleting those dozen pages definitely helped our metrics.
Here are our goals for 2018-19:
- Launch at least ten new program pages
- Launch an easier way to view what programs Lane offers
- Increase the number of organic referrals to the website by 5%, from 1,358,302 to 1,426,217 (or more).
- Determine what the next iteration of Lane’s website is going to look like
Keep your eyes on the homepage – you’ll see a change as soon as we’re ready to launch the pages to accomplish goal number 2, hopefully in the next few weeks.