Slick new Augusta University website attracts students with responsiveness and ease of use

While the eyes of the world were on Augusta late last week, many eyes within Augusta University were looking at the university website and seeing some pretty impressive changes.

Augusta.edu has undergone a complete redesign, becoming a much more stylish, much more responsive site that now shares many of the same attributes of the rest of the Augusta University branding.

“Today, we are revealing a comprehensive redesign of augusta.edu to truly align it with the bold visuals and clean styling first seen in our ‘Success is a Choice’ campaign,” Jack Evans, vice president of the Division of Communications and Marketing, said Thursday. “This is a major milestone in establishing a strong identity for Augusta University.”

To check out the site, click here. Pay special attention to the ease of navigation, particularly around the Admissions and Academics sections, which were designed to more effectively highlight one of the university’s biggest selling points – its academic programs.

“This is the culmination of many months of hard work from a dedicated core team and dozens of people across the university,” Evans said. “We actually began the redesign project long before we had any idea that our name was changing, but the timing of the name change and development of the new brand worked out really well for the site.”

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While it worked out really well for the site in a strategic sense, the name change and brand rollout significantly complicated its development. The web team wasn’t given access to the site itself, which was built by an outside vendor, until the end of February, making the last few weeks a frenzy of activity.

“It’s been a heck of a month,” said Web Manager Cecilia Thomas, whose team implemented the change.

Built to be totally responsive no matter what device it’s viewed on, the site is a departure from the old site in several meaningful ways.

“The new site is more focused on prospective students,” Thomas said. “That was our goal – to create a site where prospective students could easily find information about Augusta University and how to register. That information was difficult to find on the old site because the navigation was a bit askew.”

To fix that, the web team changed the structure of the site to better align with the way users understand the university.

Managing 8,500 pages is no easy task. Supporting the web team are dozens of web publishers spread across all areas of the campus. These publishers are responsible for their own various areas of the site, and Thomas recommends that anyone experiencing problems with the site start inquiries there before contacting the web team at webcontent@augusta.edu.

Over the coming months, additional content will be added to augusta.edu, but as it is, the site represents a giant step forward when it comes to showcasing Augusta University to the world.

“With this website, we are at the forefront of university websites,” Thomas said.

 

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Written by
Eric Johnson

Eric Johnson is publications editor at Augusta University. You can reach him at erijohnson@augusta.edu.

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Written by Eric Johnson

Jagwire is your source for news and stories from Augusta University. Daily updates highlight the many ways students, faculty, staff, researchers and clinicians "bring their A games" in classrooms and clinics on four campuses in Augusta and locations across the state of Georgia.

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