Advancement/Communications/Alumni
What do you like about the current web site?
- New home page better
- Pictures of students fading in and out
- Nice photos
- New staff directory
- Site is more navigable than before
- Don’t have to use scroll down to see entire home page!
- Home page is centered on the screen
What would you change?
• Somewhere along the line, we lost the idea that the site was originally designed for prospectives; it’s tough for them to find the terms that they are looking for • Site use needs to be designed • Can’t find things or find the same things in many places • Difficult to find faculty by discipline and profiles are outdated. Need this information fast when the media contacts us • Faculty info needs to be consistent and searchable • Search tool stinks! • Internally, we think that we are this place that focuses on the environment, policy, etc. But then you go on the web; you see the old architecture (like the 4 old programs/schools). For example, you don’t get a sense that languages pervade everything we do here at MIIS. • The 5 pictures on the home page don’t link to the architecture/relevant info • Should be a way to access the information depending on the audience-prospective, current student, alumni, faculty, staff, donor, etc. Should see an issue/information based on what is relevant to the person…what are you supposed to see • Site reflects the way the school is organized, not the way the student wants information • Research Centers like CNS-you have to go through another site to access these and about 3-4 layers/links • We have thrown everything (in terms of information) on to the web site, but then we push people on to other sites. We have merchant accounts with outside vendors. • We should be like Amazon where you can throw multiple things in a basket, pay your tuition, make a donation, etc, etc. • Web site is super text heavy. Looks like someone wrote a paper and slapped it on the site. You have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll… • Information is outdated, like the student blogs, for example. The IEP calendar is from last spring!!! • Need more centralized calendar. People in the community are looking for this and right now this info is hard to find • Shouldn’t it be in different languages? We are a language school! • When someone is a different country trying to convince mom and dad why they want to spend all this money to come to the US and study at MIIS, we should have some information for them in their native language. • We don’t place in search results for international/foreign language search engines b/c we have nothing in other languages. • Even the Monterey Convention and Visitor Bureau have their home page in different languages. At least if the homepage could be in a different language or if we had contact info for someone prospectives could speak to about program requirements in their native language • Or at least we should have a general description of what we do (offer) in different languages • Need password protected area of web site to protect job announcements from services that we pay for or from job announcements/leads from our alumni community and various contacts. We want to protect these so not just anyone can use them and that they be exclusively for the MIIS community • Need to inventory iModules to figure out what it can do to help us • Alumni section needs to be simple and offer resources • Need donor stewardship info and profiles that they can see of students who received scholarships and how they helped the student • Need updated student profiles • Why would people come back to the web site if the info is old and not updated? • Maybe we should have a rotating home page • The paradigm of how people use web sites is changing. Instead of doing what we are doing now, which is pushing information to people; people aren’t even going to web sites anymore. They are aggregating information/having information sent to them via feeds. • People want customization; students don’t go to school web sites anymore. They get info sent to them via aggregators • No student life area, not vibrant. You get no sense of what the community is like and what it is really like to live and study in Monterey. • Student Blog was great, but stopped. Do we pay students to keep up blogging so that this can remain fresh? • Could not find a mission statement anywhere on the web site!!! Even using the search function. Now that’s a problem! • The cumbersome excel spreadsheet course schedule is awful and embarrassing!!! It is terrible! • We have no course catalog. • We need more photos with more phrases that are more relevant to the audience. • We have to keep it current. Maybe we should downsize it to make it more manageable. • Should have the school/program news lists feed into the main news list on the home page • Intranet for staff vs. external • Problem with intranet is that it is not accessible when traveling. We had one; people didn’t use it. • Have the intranet link off the main web site and have it password protected.
What do you use the web site for now?
• Banner • Directory • Get specific info • Calendaring-but need it to be better • Faculty expertise for press and donor engaging • Latest news section • Course offerings
How would you like to use the web site in the future?
• There is no information about the things happening in Monterey, life in Monterey, beaches, parks, festivals… • Should have external sites where people could find out what’s happening in Monterey, like the Convention and Visitors Bureau, etc. • Donor payments that can be done on our site, not via sending them to an outside site/third party vendor • Create a website to post all job opportunities for students; right now there is not one place where everything is posted. • If we enable the web site to feed, students don’t have to go on to the web site • People are confused about where do you post things. Also there is a communications divide: some people only use yammer, some people don’t use it …CNS doesn’t use it, there’s now a MIIS web aggregator, there’s firstclass… • We need a large scale discussion of how do we get info out to the right audiences-students, staff, donors, alumni…We need to create guidelines. • Students are confused about where to go for information. • Side discussion on when First Class is permanently shutting down. • If you are not yet on outlook, you are not getting the MIIS@Work postings. • There was then a big discussion about bridging the exchange between the two mailing systems and the various issues/difficulties this has caused. • The larger question: WHAT GOES WHERE??? • Need a weather feed or perhaps a web cam. Location and weather is one of our greatest assets. Why are we not capitalizing on this? • We used to have a button where you could buy MIIS merchandise. Where is it now? Even used search engine and could not find it! • Toni liked the Midd “Go” search function and seemed to think that it is much better than what we currently have in place. • The IA is bad, making it even more difficult to search. • We should have a page with a glossary of all of the MIIS acronyms heavily used. • We should be proud of our faculty and all of their accomplishments, publications, etc. We don’t showcase them enough. They should have a profile with the look and feel of perhaps a Facebook profile page. • If you are a student trying to access information about, for example, Peace and Security, immediately, they should see a snapshot of the courses, publications, faculty, and every way that we address this area, instead of drilling down to 20 different links to find this information. • E-Commerce on our site stinks! We could keep using outside vendors and sending people to outside sites. It might be cheaper to go with a consolidated solution. For example, CSUMB just recently went with Touch Net Market Place. With this one tool, you can pay for pretty much anything that you might need to pay…buy events tickets, registration fees…anything…you name it. • This E-commerce solution might be expensive as an initial investment, but in the long run, it might actually be cheaper. AND it’s a streamlined and branded solution. • By sending people to these external E-commerce sites, you run the risk of loosing them. • WHY are people in lines registering for classes or at the cashier? Transactionally, we are FAILING! One thing a business a business should do well is getting people’s money!!! We make this so difficult here! • CLS is hidden on the current site. We should make CLS and certificate programs stand out more. • Getting back to the E-commerce subject…We should look to Amazon. They have amazing cart technology. Amazon will alert customers with messages like: we see that you have something in your cart, but have not checked out yet. Or, you have some thing in your cart; do you know that this item is now on sale? Etc, etc.
Examples of good web sites out there
• http://www.mbrfoundation.ae/English/Pages/Default.aspx Has English and Arabic • Edustyle.com • We need to be careful that if we add flash, etc, that people in less developed countries/with less technological capabilities…that we don’t cut them off. We have to be careful about this.
