Improving findability for community college prospects
Community colleges have a problem. When polled, 59% of community college markets said their biggest website challenge is getting prospects to start the application process. That’s why when Three Rivers College, a two-year institution in Southeast Missouri, came to Paskill for a new website, we knew exactly where to start.
Our goal was to make it easier for students and prospects to find information quickly on their website. We prioritized streamlining navigation and content, improving accessibility, and making website maintenance easy and innovative.
Cleaning up the digital clutter
Our audit of Three Rivers’ site found repetitive content and many unneeded pages. After removing unnecessary content, we were able to reduce the footprint of the website by nearly 65%.
From there, we focused on making the remaining content work harder to attract prospects and give them the information they needed to make decisions. This included:
- Adding a program finder to help current and prospective students see what classes, faculty, locations, and even careers aligned with their degree or certificate
- Implementing a new SEO-informed content strategy that bolstered search results while tailoring content to what prospects were searching for
All these changes gave the site a quicker page load speed and boosted SEO and mobile performance.
Simplifying backend processes
But it wasn’t just content that was streamlined. We also worked to simplify processes for the Three Rivers team. Paskill experts coached them on how to make their pages more effective, explaining readability concerns and making user experience recommendations. A module-based style guide also allows Three Rivers to maintain existing pages and create new ones more easily while keeping page layouts consistent and efficient.
Updating our old website was Herculean, it took forever to make the simplest change, and it took a fairly high degree of technical skill. With the rollout of the new website, the backend functionality is very simple. It also gives us the ability because there is not a high-tech requirement to make those changes to allow many more people to update their own section.
More from the Paskill team
We’re always thinking about the next big thing in higher ed marketing. Here’s the latest from our team of experts.
