The University of South Alabama's homepage was reimagined to effectively reach the prospective student and parent. The layout was designed with mobile responsiveness in mind, using large photos and bold colors and typography, and navigation to key destinations is clear. We wanted users to find the information they were looking for as quickly as possible.

A two-month, year-over-year comparison shows that visitors were routed faster during an important time in the recruitment calendar. In its first summer cycle, traffic to the admissions webpage increased 184%. The new homepage reached 27% more users and 47% more first-time visitors than the design it replaced — while generating 9.5% more clicks per page view. More people found the university, and found what they were looking for, in less time.

A university homepage is a routing surface, not a destination. Its job is to orient a visitor and hand them off to admissions, academics or athletics, for example, as quickly as possible. This was the guiding principle behind this project, and my role was to inform the strategy, content architecture and user experience that shaped the redesign, defining the navigational hierarchy and priority pathways before handing off to build. In addition, I communicated the thinking behind the website redesign to the campus community in the form of town hall presentations.

Other Metrics Worth Mentioning