Albertus Magnus College

The Albertus Magnus College external website was in desperate need of an overhaul in every sense of the word when I arrived on campus in December 2018. Over the course of two years, together with my Web Manager, Jeffrey Scott, we were able to roll the entire 2,500+ page site over from an FTP setup into a new OUCampus CMS, concurrently while conducting a full SEO audit, content upgrade, and redesign.

The unique challenge faced by the College’s website it needed to appeal to three distinct target audiences: rising high school seniors, working adults interested in earning their Bachelor degree, and potential graduate students. There were a number of programs that were available to both the traditional undergraduate, as well as the working adult undergraduate. Previously, the website had two separate versions of these pages for each target audience, with minor differences; when a change was needed on one program page, it was also needed on the other, and this was also contributing to duplicate content penalties from Google.

Jeffrey and I were able to combine our experience and create program pages that would speak to multiple target audiences. Overall, the new program pages increased unique page views by 86%, decreased bounce rates by 100%, increased page entrances by 248%, and increased page conversions by 12%.

My goal was to make the website work for Jeffrey and I – not the other way around. I added jQuery expiration dates to banners and events; previously, developers needed to manually clean out this code. I created XSL templates to allow for faster page creation; I overhauled on-page SEO to ensure all pages where calibrated for the most responsive organic search while also fixing errors affecting the site’s Google ranking; I tackled accessibility issues; I conceptualized and brought to life the new mega menu navigation system.