Winona web and blogs
While working as a web content specialist at Winona State University, my goal was to improve the experience of the WSU website as well as assist in the development of the WSU suite of blogs. The web and blog content was created and edited by WSU students and staff.
Role and contribution
I collaborated with staff and students to adapt their content for a better structural and visual experience. My role was to restructure content pages on the WSU website and assisted on building out a suite of blogs. The Warrior Way blog was fully designed and built by me.
Web update process
The tricky part of working on WSU pages is that the site is edited via an older CMS tool. This makes developing new features and functionality a challenge. With that in mind, we focused on using the tools we had to improve the experience and functionality while also working on larger feature updates to make the process easier.
I would first work with the faculty, staff or students that owned the page on a heuristic of their current experience. We would work together to gather, organize and edit the content in a logical way while also improving the visual design if possible. The bulk of the work was simplifying the navigation into a logical flow.
Before update process
After reorganization and updates
The Warrior Way blog
The Warrior Way blog was designed and built by me in WordPress. It is a highlight piece that is meant to spotlight faculty, staff, alumni, students and friends of the university that are living the university mission. The blog’s logo, photos and writing were provided by the students on campus. Learn more about Winona’s Warriors.
Student run blogs
The main student blogs were built out by a third party vendor with guidance and help from our team. These blogs include Admissions, Improving Our World, Campus Life and Wellness. For this group of blogs, along with supporting the vendor, I built out a social media feed and information pages.
Results
While at WSU, we implemented the tool Siteimprove. This tool allowed us to track down issues with accessibility, spelling mistakes and perform general quality assurance. As a team, working through site updates with the help of Siteimprove, we saw a whopping 90% reduction in errors and misspellings.
60% increase in traffic to updated pages
90% reduction in errors & misspellings
Reduction in accessibility issues