Happy birthday, dear web site!

by in , , ,

Our little darling just turned one! On Saturday, August 15, CI's mobile-friendly responsive web site celebrated its first birthday, and we sure are proud of it.

It's been a great first year, and here's what we have to show for it:

13% increase in pageviews of the CI web site overall
27% increase in pageviews of the About CI page
41% increase in pageviews of the Academics page
65% increase in pageviews of the Visit Campus and campus tours pages
69% increase in pageviews of the main Admissions page (Admissions & Costs)
145% increase in pageviews across all Admissions pages
468% increase in pageviews across all tuition and fees pages
1421% increase in pageviews of the Student Life page

...and other significant increases across academic and administrative web sites...

...and a 29% decrease in our bounce rate across all primary CI web site properties...

...and a 39% decrease in exit percentage across all primary CI web site properties.

What do all these stats mean? They mean that more people are visiting the CI web site, and people are engaging more deeply with our web content.

If that wasn't enough, our web site was also recognized with 3 awards:

2014 Collegiate Advertising Awards Silver Winner in Website Design
2015 CASE District VII Award of Excellence (Bronze) for Institutional Web Sites (PDF)
30th Annual Education Advertising Awards Merit Award for www.csuci.edu 

Not too bad for a young university in Camarillo!

Since we launched, we've continued to make incremental improvements. Some highlights include:

  1. Establishing a rapid, rotating refresh cycle for the banner images on the CI home page.
  2. Changing the home page banners from static images to clickable images. We'll be keeping track of how this change in functionality increases our visitor interaction.
  3. Working closely with our Enrollment Management team to develop and deploy a new consolidated "Calendars" page, which combines events, important dates and deadlines for prospective and incoming students.
  4. Integrating new videos to help prospective students, parents and visitors to get to know CI.
  5. Migrating all but 3 of our academic program web sites to our new mobile-friendly, responsive web site design, including subsequent re-designs of the Anthropology, Chicana/o Studies, and Nursing web sites.
  6. Upgrading our Google Analytics to use Google Tag Manager to help us better manage our web analytics. 
There's still a lot more that's in progress:
  • Migration of our Giving, Extended University and Library web sites to our new mobile-friendly, responsive design
  • An updated electronic campus tour and viewbook
  • Updates to the Housing and Dining web sites
  • Migration of CI-developed web applications that are still using our legacy web framework.
How did we get here? A fantastic team of web professionals and student assistants worked with our entire campus community to turn ideas into reality, and our strategic partner Stamats helped us to identify and document an effective and long-lasting web and social media strategy. Check out last year's web site preview for more detail about the principles that guided the creation of our web site.

Please join me in celebrating the 1st birthday of the new CI web site, and I encourage you to share any comments or suggestions in the comments here (or via email to peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu).