The vendor is required to provide this website audit shall be on its value as a marketing tool for student recruitment and retention.
- Website employs a responsive, user-centric design.
- Our top-level navigation is designed to allow fast access to academic information (including academic programs) and offices, while the key audiences of current and prospective students can self-identify to quickly find information that is most relevant to their unique needs.
- This website serves multiple purposes; it is simultaneously:
• Agency primary marketing website for undergraduate and graduate education:
1. On-campus (two campuses), online, and hybrid education
2. Domestic and international students.
- Web audit feedback related to our current approach to these administrative pages, whether in support of the approach or pushing back on it with alternative recommendations.
- Undergraduate and graduate CRM websites that address prospective students once they’ve entered into the “inquired>applied>accepted>enrolled” funnel
• Undergraduate and graduate admissions offices manage these websites (slate CRM).
- Undergraduate and graduate catalog/curriculum websites
• The provost’s office manages these websites (Acalog and Curriculog).
- Administrative hub website “my central”
• This primarily addresses student, faculty and staff administrative-type relationships with university.
- Human resources tools
• HR provides access to several tools for current and prospective faculty and staff.
- Athletics website
• This website is fully managed within the athletics unit of university.
- SWOT analysis
• Management overview of findings: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
- Technical SEO audit
• Site architecture: ensure the website structure is logical and SEO-friendly; evaluate code for alignment with current coding standards.
• Crawlability and indexing: ensure search engines can crawl the site effectively; review the robots.txt file, sitemap, and use of “no index” tags
• Load speed: detailed review of factors affecting site speed on desktop and mobile: html/php and css stylesheet code efficiency, load order, etc.
• Mobile friendliness: test how well the site works on mobile devices
• Canonical tags: ensure proper use to avoid duplicate content issues
• Menuing systems/layout strengths and weaknesses (desktop and mobile)
• Other: evaluate other SEO-related strengths and opportunities such as the priority of adding structured data (with implementation/migration recommendations)
• Modern campus CMS customization features: recommend how to best utilize those user experience customization tools available upon university move to CMS cloud hosting.
- User experience (UX) audit
• Evaluate site UX in general as well as from the specific perspectives of current students (building awareness of graduate programs and interfacing with various student-facing offices, services and resources) and prospective undergraduate and graduate students at each step in the funnel (suspect, inquired, applied, accepted, enrolled).
• Site navigation: evaluate top- and sub-level navigation from a functional perspective
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO): analyze the pathways to conversion and identifying blocks or improvement areas
• Calls to action: evaluate the effective use of call to action buttons
• Internal search implementation and effectiveness
• Use of graphics and video: iconography, hero images, embedded video, sliders, etc.
• Social media links and integration: assess how well the website is integrated with its social media profiles
• Duplicate content: identify any issues with redundant or copied content within the site
• Site navigation: evaluate top- and sub-level navigation from a perspective of various personal.