Rachel Yeates, Campus Carrier News Editor
Earlier this semester, the updated Berry website was launched and has received a great deal of positive feedback, said director of e-communcations and head of the site redesign Cameron Jordan.
“People love the appearance,” Jordan said. “They feel like it looks fresh … One of the things we heard from students before was they felt like the website looked out of date.”
The primary goal of the update, however, was to cater to the growing number of mobile viewers, which, according to the website’s Google Analytics report for the year thus far, makes up 28 to 30 percent of total users.
After exploring many possibilities, the team decided to follow the example of other colleges and adopt a “responsively designed” website format.
“The website adjusts itself automatically for various screen widths,” Jordan explained. “So if you look at it on a desktop, you may have content in a two-or-three-column layout, [but] if you look at it on a mobile device, it takes those and moves them into a single column.”
The team sought out opinions from students, faculty, alumni and parents when shaping their plans for the new website.
“A lot of planning went into the website.” Jordan said. “We didn’t want to spend the time and the money developing a website that people weren’t happy with.”
They worked initially with a third-party company that handled a bulk of the development and design.
“Once they were finished, they handed all the code back off to us,” Jordan said. “We’re not married to that company by any means. So now that we have the code, we can continue to do the updates from in-house.”
Student workers like sophomore Drew Sparks began helping move content over to the new site at the beginning of last semester.
Sparks, a web developer assistant for the Berry Information Technology Students program (B.I.T.S.), noticed that some current students were having difficulties reorienting themselves to the new website.
“Everyone was really used to the old one,” Sparks said. “It’s like going from an early version of Windows, like Windows 98, to Windows 7. It’s going to be better, but you’re going to have people really upset at you for making them update.”
If anyone is having trouble with the website or finds pages that could be improved or corrected, Sparks said that B.I.T.S. welcomes feedback.
“Whenever somebody submits something to the website feedback form, we are on top of it,” Sparks said.
Future plans for the website include an interactive campus map to be launched with the opening of the Welcome Center this January.
Cameron also noted a continued focus on making the website more personal and engaging.
“We’re really trying to figure out how to integrate more stories into the website,” he said. “And not just on the home page but within the individual departments.”
Students are noticing these efforts already.
Junior Nikki Lokhandwala likes how the website highlights not only how Berry looks but also on the student activity.
“When people that are from other schools or high schoolers come to the website, I think it attracts them a lot more because they’re like ‘oh that looks like so much fun’ or ‘hey, that looks interesting,’” she said.
The new format also makes future revisions easier. The workers are glad to have reached this point and can now reflect on how to improve the site further.
“The nice thing about the web is that it’s not static,” Jordan said. “It’s always changing, so we’re always trying to make things better.”