The University of Mississippi is beginning the new year with improvements to the university website, intended to increase functionality for students, faculty and other website visitors. The new UM homepage, which launched Dec. 12 is the first phase in a series of updates slated to roll out over the next few months.
Along with the homepage, subpages like the school bio page, admissions information panels and student life pages were among the 1,100 new pages that were updated, Jim Zook, chief marketing and communications officer, said.
“What we launched in December was Phase I,” Zook said. “It covered pages directly accessible from the home page like our academic undergraduate program pages. We launched a faculty staff directory, and we also launched some landing pages for academic departments that we are now building out in collaboration with the academic departments.”
The redesign project began in August 2020, launching a standardized website to keep students and faculty informed of their progress. An advisory committee consisting of professionals in IT, communications, marketing and other areas of campus life worked in collaboration on the project.
“We’ve had input from a variety of people,” Zook explained. “We had an advisory committee on the front end that included students, faculty, and staff to get input on what the new website needed to offer and what we should aspire for it to offer.”
Noah Hubbard, a recent UM graduate with degrees in accountancy, international studies and Spanish, was a student who began work on the project by offering suggestions to the committee from the perspective of a student-user.
“I thought the old website was not dynamic enough and did not represent the University compared to how other universities market themselves,” Hubbard said. “I gave input for the website and they were super receptive to what I had to say and remembered me a few months later when they wanted to bring in more student opinion.”
This is the first redesign of UM’s homepage in over 13 years. Project leadership cited inconsistencies in web design as the primary reason for the update.
“One of the keys to this–and why it has taken a while– is not trying to just put a new skin on the old website; we are building an entirely new site from the ground up,” Zook said. “If you look at the old website, it did not have a lot of standardization or consistency from page to page. People found it frustrating when going from one page to another and the navigation changing for the user. We needed a common playbook across campus as to how we handled the website through web governance.”
Hubbard also said he encouraged updates for pages most commonly searched for by prospective students.
“I tried to always evaluate the website from a student’s perspective,” Hubbard elaborated. “One thing I looked at specifically was Financial Aid and the pages associated with enrolling at Ole Miss. Prospective students would need to know how to find costs and scholarships and things like that quickly if they are gauging interest in the University.”
When asked what else is in store for the University’s online presence, Zook teased the forthcoming second and third phase of the project.
“In the second phase we get into a lot more of the administrative units like Student Affairs or Diversity and Community Engagement,” Zook said. “Users will continue to see a blend of old and new content over time that will become the new, updated sites. Over the coming weeks and months you’re going to see a lot of new pages added to the site.”
The advisory committee also worked in conjunction with departments on campus to help organize and develop their own updated websites on the new platform.
This work seems to have paid off — UM students have already noticed the updates, crediting new visuals and functionality to a better experience on the site.
“I love the new sleek look of the Ole Miss homepage,” Shayla Hanson, a sophomore biology major, said. “I think the exciting photos and organization of tabs add a nice touch to the Ole Miss experience for prospective students.”
At the onset of the project, Zook said that one purpose of the new website was to create a space “that tells the university’s story, but also meet(s) needs like managing classes, studies and work.”
When asked whether he believed the update has accomplished that goal, Zook said that the first phase of the project laid the groundwork, but the effort is not yet complete in creating an online, visual representation of the unique story of Ole Miss.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do to accomplish that,” Zook said. “We have laid the foundation for it, but we are still working on the processes we need within our shop to continue creating compelling content in the new site. We have the tools and people to do that, we just need to get in a rhythm of providing new content for the site and for students and faculty.”
