In redesigning its website, Northwest College put a greater emphasis on prospective students.

Where the previous design put events and news from the college front and center, the new look puts tools for potential students at the fore, underneath a scene from the top of Heart Mountain. Events and news are still visible on the homepage by scrolling down a bit, but the main bar provides links to request info, visit campus, start an application, information on cost and financial aid, and a link for current students and staff.

NWC marketing and communications director Carey Miller said that’s in line with the trend around the country to focus on attracting new students.

President Lisa Watson said she wished she had access to the tools now embedded in the website, saying they would have been helpful during her own college years.

“I think it’s turned out really nice,” Watson said. “I hope it will serve our students going forward.”

The one-time costs for design, system implementation, hosting set-up and content migration assistance added up to $115,700. Miller said the high figure was partly because the college went without a website coordinator from 2019 until last spring as a part of cost-cutting efforts.

She gave trustees a digital tour of the new site at their Dec. 9 meeting, a week after rolling it out.

“This has been a pretty long project,” she said. “It's been about a year and a half in the making if not a little longer.”

This project involved migrating more than 1,500 web pages from the previous content management system to one run by Modern Campus, which Miller said offers a lot of nice features.

Watson said the previous website did do a lot of things well, but was very weak in providing good information on NWC’s academic programs. That’s a strength of the new site, as each program provides a fact sheet on the job outlook for careers tied to each program, as well as the average salaries of potential jobs stemming from them.

For students who don’t know which field to go into, there’s an option to type in their interests and get information about programs that might be a match.

Watson said the deep academic program content was a major reason the college chose Modern Campus, based in Toronto, for the redesign.

“If nothing else, this is what I get out of this website for students,” Watson said, adding, “To be able to take that degree and have a sense of what that means. I wished I would've seen something like this.”

Another key feature of the new website was put together by the college’s interim multimedia production specialist, Ronnie Wolfe.

Wolfe took 360-degree images all over campus — even waiting until the last minute to get the most up-to-date images of the new student center possible — to create a virtual tour of campus from scratch.

“He created this from scratch,” Miller said.

The tour allows virtual visitors to traverse the halls of buildings and jump to various spots around campus. Watson said it will be a valuable tool, as many students have told her they had no idea the campus was so beautiful until they arrived.

“We've done some good work here and we should show how cool it is to be at Northwest College,” she said.

As a part of its three-year contract with Modern Campus, NWC will pay another $33,900 a year for licensing, cloud-based web hosting, a support package and two add-ons that aligned with the NWC content strategy going forward: Pathways, the tool that showcases national employment outcome data per academic program, and Insights, a module for monitoring search engine optimization, site usability and ADA accessibility.

The college’s previous provider, dotCMS, charged $18,540 a year for licensing/hosting/support etc. However, when the college sought bids a new website, the company notified staff that their fee would rise to $33,000 per year beginning in July 2024.

“And that was without any features similar to what Modern Campus was offering — the Pathways module and the Insights module — and even a discontinuation of the dotCMS Events calendar module,” Miller said. Moving to a new provider was “a no-brainer decision,” she said.

The marketing team who worked on the new website included Miller, Wolfe, Website Coordinator Keith Smith, Communications/Web and Social Media Specialist Tim Carpenter and Marketing/Graphic Design Specialist Jeremiah Howe.

Miller joked that Smith will finally be able to come out of his office after all the work he did to get the site ready. That included a soft rollout for faculty in November during which time the team was able to work out some kinks, though Miller said they’re still fixing some issues that have popped up.

Visit the new site at nwc.edu.