7 Benefits to Redesigning Your University's Website Today

Maybe there was a major shift in the market, or your college’s technology isn’t up to date.

Maybe it’s been three or four years since your last close look to your college’s website, and it’s due for a new look and feel. Maybe it needs a new, polished brand.

Whatever the reasons are, it might be a good time to upgrade your university’s website.

Ed Sussman, CEO and Founder of Buzzr says that colleges can typically hold on to a website design for about four years.

“I’ve seen people go longer than that, but a design is just like fashion,” he says. “Fashion changes and you can start to tell when things look old.”

Sussman says that content management system technology companies like Buzzr are eager to work with colleges to reconfigure their websites.

He also says college websites that take advantage of companies like Buzzr will earn seven benefits:

1) Customizable content

Sussman says web companies are able to customize the content a college may want on their website. Customizable content is a great way to freshen a college’s image and make its outdated website more interesting.

“We work with them [colleges] to get a website that’s ideally suited to their specific needs, and we configure the layout for them to make it easy,” he says. “We always do a custom design for our smaller colleges to start with, and then we implement it.”

2) The opportunity to be hosted on the Cloud

Sussman says that Cloud-hosted websites are easier to maintain, especially if a college has a small web development staff. Plus, hosting your website in the Cloud makes it so your college doesn’t have to set up its own servers.

“You don’t need your own technology staff to do updates and add features and handle security,” he says. “We do all of that stuff. We can make it simple for them to build and maintain the website.”

3) Putting your best practices into place

Sussman says companies like Buzzr will work with colleges to structure the their best web practices. That includes restructuring preexisting best practices, or creating new ones.

“We make a set of recommendations and best practices, we can vary and customize to an individual school,” he says. “We [can] start with a solution set that’s already been put together and we work with the schools to see if those choices work for them.”

4) Following the responsive design

Since students and faculty often conduct their academic lives mobile devices, it’s a good idea for your college to reconstruct its website following a responsive design.

Sussman says a responsive-designed website will detect what kind of device it’s being accessed from, and will reconfigure a version of itself to fit that device.

“If you don’t have that on your website, your website can look really funny when it’s looked at on a mobile phone or tablet,” he says. “The responsive design can detect if it’s a mobile website, and it will automatically shrink that picture or get rid of that picture. If you don’t do those things, the website can look like a giant mess.”

5) Low cost

Sussman says one of the key benefits for colleges going with companies like Buzzr as a web partner is its low cost to design a website. He says that intricate, large-scale website designs come with a price tag of a million dollars or more.