Whitman is revamping its website to update its online presence and to better distinguish it from similar schools. The new website, coming out at the end of November, will sport a home page that emphasizes Whitman-specific content more than ever.
The new home page will emphasize places across campus such as Ankeny Field, Penrose Library, the Allen Reading Room, the Science Building and Lackum Duckum. It will also feature content on Whitman’s core required class, Encounters. Both of these sections will feature comments by students.
Assistant Vice President of Communications Ruth Wardwell described why the committees designing the website decided to emphasize Encounters.
“We decided to build front-page content around Encounters. Why? Because nobody else has Encounters, [it’s] only at Whitman. And yes, there are many colleges and even universities that have first-year programs . . . many of them have similar attributes, but nobody has one just like ours,” she said.
The home page will also feature Whitman’s experiential learning offerings, such as Semester in the West and State of the State.
Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Tony Cabasco said that not all of the features of the new website are designed to cater to external audiences. Many of the changes will improve the site for internal audiences as well.
“While some of the features may focus on telling the ‘Whitman story’ by trying to provide a sense of place, other features, like the navigation links, will cater to internal audiences,” he said in an email.
Wardwell said that making the website as specific to Whitman as possible is important for engaging prospective students.
“It’s like a book cover, you know? Are you going to be able to tell what the book is about, if it interests you, by looking at that home page?” she said. “And we believe that the home page that we’ve created does illustrate Whitman’s distinguishing attributes.”
Cabasco agreed.
“We hope that the new admission web site will do a better job of communicating Whitman’s distinctive identity: the combination of academic rigor and a friendly, down-to-earth, engaging campus community: to prospective students,” he said.
When senior Jasper Bash applied to Whitman, he didn’t spend much time on the website precisely because he felt that it wasn’t the most productive way to learn specific information about Whitman.
“[All college websites] kind of look the same, I feel like,” he said.
Bash also thought that some of the organization could be improved.
“I remember seeing the current students web page [as a prospective student] and thinking, ‘This looks really busy and scary,'” he said.
While the current students page will not undergo any major design-related change, some of the updating will help bring other organizational aspects of the site up to date, which will be helpful seeing as the last update happened back in 2006-07.
“I consider what we’re doing [part of] the ongoing evolution. We’ve made some changes since then because the college changed its visual identity,” Wardwell said.
To create the new website, the college created a panel of current students to describe their experiences as prospective students. Committees of staff and faculty discussed the website, and the college also hired an external provider, Lipman Hearne, to help with the designing process.
“A college website has to serve many audiences and constituents: internal people and external people. External people would be prospective students, even prospective faculty who are considering teaching here. Internally, we have many needs: staff, faculty, special programs, departments, The Pioneer,” she said. “The navigation of the website, the header and the footer, haven’t really changed much, but the content of the home page does target external audiences.”
Wardwell emphasized that the appearance of the website is key to helping Whitman gain the recognition it deserves.
“A college website is probably the number-one window that people on the outside have,” she said.
