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On October 10, 2012, I’ll be presenting a webinar for college and university marketing and communications, admissions, and enrollment teams who are planning for a website redesign. The 1-hour session will highlight strategic and tactical best practices for planning and developing a new website that not only reaches but engages prospective students.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the topics and findings that I’ll cover.

Prospective Students: the Undergraduate vs. Graduate Audience

Pulling from 5-years of findings from student focus groups, I’ll talk about how undergraduate students and graduate students have fundamentally different approaches to researching and ultimately selecting a school. When reviewing a college or university website, prospective undergraduates ask an experience-based question: “What will it be like?” In contrast, prospective graduate students ask an outcomes-based question: “What will it do for me and my career?” I’ll discuss how these differing motivations require different strategies for site design and content organization.

Engage with video – start with the social, move to the serious

On the undergraduate side, we find it is best to have two types of video – social, light, feel-good videos that speak to the culture and experience of being a student and the more serious and academic videos that provide the differentiators that parents will want to hear. Our research shows that students typically like seeing that you have video on their first visit to the website, but they won’t watch the video – unless it seems social and fun. They’ll turn to video and especially more academic, traditional videos later in the decision making process – typically right before deciding to apply or before deciding to matriculate.

Establish Clear Calls to Action

One of the key findings from comparative research between “brick and mortar” schools and online schools is that the online schools are better at driving engagement through clear calls to action. The online schools offer multiple ways to connect – phone, e-mail, chat – and multiple on-ramps – download materials, get more information through e-mail, or attend a webinar. Low engagement schools put too much emphasis on the “Apply” button, and not enough emphasis on creating a recruitment program that offers intermediate steps to learn and to engage. Online schools are also typically better at using a “less is more” strategy when presenting information about their programs. By limiting the amount of content available on the website, prospects are compelled to reach out for more information and engage with the institution.

Join the Webinar

I hope you’ll join the session on October 10 at 12:00 PM. Click here to register.

Each attendee will receive a copy of OHO Interactive’s Higher-Education RFP planner: 60 Questions to Ask Before Writing Your RFP.

Brandeis University launched a new admissions website targeting prospective undergraduate students. OHO Interactive partnered with the office of communication and the admissions team to create a rich photo-driven experience. This is the fourth site that OHO has launched for Brandeis University.

The strategy for the site was to create a new, simple information architecture that allowed prospects to quickly jump between sections. In addition, the messaging is driven by slideshows and concise headlines. The amount of page copy was reduced to make pages easier to scan.

The engagement included:

• Information architecture
• Visual design
• Development
• Template build in the Hannon Hill CMS Cascade

Learn more about university and college website engagements from OHO

Yesterday, I spoke in a webinar on how colleges can retool their websites to reach more students, encourage admitted students to enroll, and attract graduate students who have more options than ever. If you'd like to see the recorded version of this webinar, we've just posted the video.