By Hannah Hecht–The newly redesigned Morningside College website went live earlier last week. Its implementation is part of a campus-wide project to improve the quality of Morningside’s online presence.
The new site features a sleeker, more modern style, with a user-friendly interface and simple navigation. The website has narrowed its emphasis and now concentrates on attracting prospective students.
“The focus of the site is a lot different,” said Kevin Pottebaum, Morningside’s digital communications manager. “The old one was an osh-posh of different stuff with no target audience. Now, prospective students are the main emphasis.”
Pottebaum, along with Jenny Thomas, publications editor and writer, and Dave Rebstock, sports information director, worked with the website development firm Click Rain on the project. The group wanted the Morningside website to stand out against other college websites.
“We got some ideas from other college’s sites, but we wanted to differentiate ourselves,” said Pottebaum. “We wanted to be a little more mobile friendly. The new site has a responsive design on smartphone, tablet, or computer screen with the same functionality on all different platforms.”
Many students across campus have had positive responses to the redesign.
“I think that the new website will help more students want to come to Morningside because it’s more professional,” said freshman Tracy Gates, “It makes us look like we’re the real deal.”
However, some students, faculty, and staff are having trouble finding information they used to have easy access to on the old site. For example, the new site doesn’t include a link to the academic calendar.
“In the future, we would like for anyone on campus to be able to find anything that they would need on the intranet [the Morningside Portal page],” Pottebaum said. “The hope was that we would launch them [the redesigned website and the redesigned Portal] around the same time.”
However, Morningsiders will have to wait a little while to use the redesigned Portal because the key organizer behind the project in the information technology department left the college earlier this year. It will be a little longer before the new intranet design goes “live.”
The new site is housed at the usual domain: http://www.morningside.edu.
And luckily, anyone looking for information found on the old site can access it at oldwww.morningside.edu.
Leave a Reply