Go for the Goals: Helping Prospectives Find What They Need, How They Need It—and Look Good Doing It

Prospective students are flooded with college information daily. So how do you make a website that grabs, and keeps, the attention of these tech-savvy, highly connected teenagers in a sea of similar-seeming, yet very different, schools? You need to give them what they need, how they need it. But you’ve also got to look good—and have fun—doing it.

We’ll take you through the common actions of a prospective student, and show how you can help them meet their goals (and yours) in a streamlined, straightforward yet exciting way:

*Explore majors and minors? Check.
*Find tuition rates and aid? Yep.
*Understand alumni outcomes? Got it.
*Get a preview of your campus—and your students? Done and done.
*Start—and finish—the application process? Easy as 1, 2, 3 (4, 5, in our case).

Hear how Case Western Reserve’s small but mighty University Marketing and Communications team did a complete overhaul of their Undergraduate Admission site—from user research and information architecture, to writing and multimedia, to development and rollout in an entirely new CMS—all within four months. (And more than doubled traffic to the apply page, increased year-over-year quarterly unique visits by 20,000 and actually created a site that embodied the university’s culture!)

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