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Elevated promotional content for prospective students and families

We’re helping future Loggers get to know us by making the information they need most easily accessible. Our new, top-level pages provide an easy-to-navigate way for prospective students and families to explore our history, mission, program and course offerings, and the student experience. Current students, faculty members, and staff members can find more detailed department, office, and program content on lower-level, internally focused pages.

After Puget Sound web page screen shot

One of the goals of the new website was to focus more on individual user groups' experiences. Historically, our website has housed more than 10,000 pages, almost all of which were available for various audiences to wade through trying to determine what was applicable to them. Prospective students paged through detailed information intended for current students or other internal audiences, and our current students, faculty, and staff sorted through a variety of information online for promotional purposes or geared toward internal audiences that they weren't a part of for nuggets of information that applied to them. To work toward improving those user experiences, we worked with our website design vendor to develop a primary experience oriented toward prospective and other external users groups, and less promotional, more functional gateways for our internal audiences to find the detailed information they needed access to on a daily basis.

In short, the global navigation of our site (About, Academics, Admission, Student Life) is geared toward prospective students, and as such, contains a cultivated selection of high level promotional information of interest to that audience.

We worked closely with department representatives in many areas to make an initial determination of what content was of interest or applicable to prospective students versus our internal audiences. (Though we're aware refinements and adjustments will need to be made!) 

Everything you need in one easy-to-find spot

To access the information you need on a regular basis, including your academic department page, details about housing and dining, and more, click on RESOURCES FOR in the global navigation at the top of each page of the website and select your resource gateway. Each resource gateway—for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, families, and community members—contains curated links so you can jump straight to what you need.

Resources For website menu screen shot

You'll find links to gateways for several audience groups under the Resources For menu, including:

  • Current Undergraduate Students: Information and links on this gateway are pertinent to our current undergraduate students and will take those users to specific and detailed information, as opposed to high-level promotional content on a given topic.
  • Current Graduate Students:  More than ever before, we have culled and identified information specifically of interest to our graduate student audience, intending to remove from their gateway the parts of our content that aren't applicable to them, and make sure they can find the pieces that are.
  • Current Parents & Families: While some of this information is also available for current undergraduate students, this is an area that parents and families can find information they may be interested in related to their enrolled student's needs, including any content specifically for them.
  • Faculty:  Starting with the collection of links on the old Faculty & Staff gateway, our intention with this gateway is to provide access to all the faculty-specific content our professors need, as well as access to general employment information they may also need.
  • Staff: This gateway is intended to provide easy access to all the general university information staff members may need, including policies, finance details, and more.
  • Community:  While the global navigation is focused on the prospective student experience and includes some information for other external audiences, we decided to make a gateway as a launching point for a lot of non-prospective, non-internal audience content so that community members, local or otherwise, have a specific place to look for information.
Faculty introductions put our profs front and center

We know the impact our faculty members have on the student experience, so an important part of redesigning externally facing academic program pages was dedicating space to introduce the program faculty. Short summary bios and headshot photos in the Meet the Faculty carousel help prospective students and families put faces to names and give a sense of the research interests, courses taught by, and subject matter expertise of our faculty. Longer bios, including educational background, links to personal websites, and more, can be found on faculty pages.

Need to update your info? Some information is pulled directly from the university database, but you may submit a ticket to the service desk with changes or corrections to your bio text or headshot.

Faculty carousel on academic program website screen shot

While every redesign has limits to the number of new page designs it can accommodate, in this project we wanted to pay special attention to developing a page format that helped our academic programs highlight a variety of engaging information for easy access by prospective students. The new promotional landing page for academic programs includes a variety of mechanisms for highlighting program-specific content, including:

  • A banner image at the top of the page specific to the program
  • Subnavigation specifically focused on the prospective audience's needs, including easy surfing to other university academic programs
  • Contact information sidebar that can include social media links, specific contact person information, and program office hours
  • Bulleted highlights about program learning objectives
  • Sample job titles and locations gleaned from our alumni reporting
  • Promotional program overview, usually in synch with the one-sheet reference that was developed in recent years for use in Admission with prospective students
  • A quote from a student, faculty member, or other person about the program
  • Sample courses selected by the program and pulling information from the Peoplesoft database
  • A faculty carousel, also pulling information from the database, that features brief bios highlighting faculty teaching and/or research interests
  • A section to highlight specific program experiential learning and post-Puget Sound experiences
  • Stories related to the program pulled from the university's Story Hub
  • A section to focus on physical campus facilities related to the program or how the program teaching expands beyond the physical bounds of campus
  • An optional media gallery that can feature captioned images or videos
  • Callouts allowing prospective students to easily connect with Admission if they are inspired by program content
  • Callouts displaying other related programs prospective students and their families may want to check out
Featured photography and stories on nearly every page

These design elements allow us to show off our beautiful North End campus and highlight the students, faculty, and staff who make up our community. Programs and departments can showcase offerings and activities through carousel photo galleries, large embedded photos or videos, and featured quotes, giving visitors to our website the chance to dig deeper into academic programs, student research, events, and more.

Our new website offers added flexibility to add story and news content to your pages. Most of our new webpage templates allow you to add story modules to the page. This provides content editors with more tools to share related university news and announcements, featured faculty members or students, and special programs and activities, offering visitors a richer exploration of campus life.

Featured Stories on a web page screen shot

As always when we redesign the website, we have a new site look and feel. The visual design of the site is intended to be institutionally branded (lots of maroon!) and provide a plethora of layout options for use on the site. The increase in content layout options will allow use of content-appropriate options that may not have been available in our previous sites, such as accordion options or multiple layout options for callouts depending on image availability or desired visual effect. New layout options include:

  • Optional banner photos
  • Bulleted list design options
  • Variations on columnar callouts
  • Ability to embed images/video individually or within a media gallery
  • Accordion features
  • Sidebar options including contact information and SMALL text callouts
  • Ability to pull stories and events into pages in one-, two-, or three-up layouts
  • Quote or "brand message" callout to highlight text
  • Slider options for in-place content rotation
  • Visual callouts for numeric or other "fact" data including a photo
  • Callout options including a full-width image with text box overlay

In addition, the background of the site moves at a different rate than the foreground information, an effect called parallax that provides visual depth for the site. This as well as other subtle features like button animations gives the overall site a level of panache and polish that were missing in previous iterations.

An easy way to know what's happening on campus

When redesigning the university events calendar, we were responsive to feedback about making the calendar easier to navigate and more interactive. The default display now shows a month's worth of events at a glance with the option to click into days with more events than fit in the calendar view. Sort events by main categories, such as "lectures," "sciences," and more, using the category buttons above the calendar. The alternate display—list view—allows you to sort events by even more, specialized categories, including "faculty," "student life," and "visual arts." Additionally, featured events may be added to most page templates, sharing events more easily throughout the website and boosting visibility for upcoming campus activities.

Website events calendar screen shot

Our new events calendar has a variety of components, including a calendar and list view, general and program-specific categories to filter events through, ability to add events to your personal calendar or share through social media, and more. Once integrated with the university's new Okta authentication system, any member of the Puget Sound community will be able to submit an event for potential inclusion in the calendar (in the short term until Okta is integrated, we have a temporary form in place).

As noted above, these calendar events can easily be featured on any page in the site. 

The search you have been waiting for

With a website composed of more than 10,000 pages, it can be difficult to find what you’re looking for—even when you know where to look. To help visitors to our website find relevant content, search results are identified by content type: story, person, event, program. These categories correspond to specialized page templates and are prioritized over general, basic pages. View only the results in a particular category or view all results, where pages with specialized content types are noted above the link.

New website search results screen shot

Orientation Video and Content Editor Training

New Site Orientation

We offered a series of new website design orientation sessions to introduce the various new site elements and the reasoning behind them. Here is a video of one of them, complete with some questions from our audience. 

Watch the Video
Content Editor Training

If your management has asked you to become a website content editor for your department, you can take the video training (or refer back to these modules as needed) and the accompanying assessment. Please note that we can only have so many editors, so there is a limit to how many people in one area we can provide access to. If you have questions before you take the time to watch the training videos, please contact the Web Manager to confirm availability. Also, please note, we cannot add student editors at this time.

CMS Content Editor Training