Over the past year, Skyline Shines readers may have noticed changes in the Skyline College website. Starting with the homepage, the web team in MCPR have migrated most of the college subsites over to a new responsive design. “Responsive” means that the site can be easily viewed on mobile phones or tablets in addition to laptops and desktop computers. Each departmental office or program usually has its own subsite within our website; together we have over 200 subsites!
The same old content was not just migrated over to the new design; many months of work were put into rewriting and organizing web content so that users can now quickly find what they are looking for in our college site. Of special note is the Admissions Apply page. Working in partnership with Admissions and Records, the web team recognized that prospective students found our old application process confusing and streamlined and clarified the process. Also on every subsite which has “open hours”, such as the Financial Aid and Transfer Center sites, the team created a large box on each homepage displaying the hours and contact information to better serve the students.
The web team worked to pare down the text overall in keeping with web best practices, which are different from print guidelines. In addition, they simplified and shortened some long webpages by “hiding” the text in accordions or modal windows, which are buttons that when clicked, expose the text to interested users.
The College continues to use the OmniUpdate content management system, which allows the web team to control site permissions and revert to previous page versions. The College also has the added security of its website being stored on two separate servers. The web team is slowly retraining users on OmniUpdate so that departments can make their own updates to the site and submit the pages for publishing.
A new Contact Skyline College page was also created that helps direct messages to the correct recipient to assure that our community can communicate with the College efficiently.
In addition to revamping the website, the College has stepped up its social media posting frequency on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Check it out!
Article and Photo by Liz Gaudet
