Are you proud of the web pages featuring your academic majors and departments?
According to a survey conducted by Stamats in 2004 and published in their newsletter, you’d better put your best efforts in these pages as they are at the top of your prospective students’ list when they visit college websites.
“Stamats 2004 TeensTALKâ„¢ survey results report that nearly one-third of college-bound high school students delve into your site and start looking for majors. This means your department sections and majors listings must represent the very best of your marketing content”.
That’s why departmental and program pages should be designed with prospective students in mind and go beyond the traditional mission statement and the list of required courses.
Stamats suggest the following starting points to beef up your program pages:
- Success stories and quotes from graduates
- Interesting profiles of students in that department
- Faculty biographies that show personalities instead of a curriculum vitae
I’ve actually worked on such a redesign with my college’s department chairs. One of the key points of this project was to feature student quotes to pique web visitors’ interest. We ended up using this kind of quotes to explain why students chose their majors.
These testimonials were placed at the top of our department pages – which was considered really unusual (“Student testimonials before the mission statement???”) by some of our website stakeholders.