CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
Services we provide:
- Sitefinity Implementation
- CMS Development
- Accessibility & Compliance
- SEO
- Google Analytics Tracking
- UI/UX Design
ABOUT CMU
Central Michigan University (CMU) is a thriving university that offers more than 300 top academic programs on its 800+ acre campus and serves over 15,500 enrolled students and 243,000 alumni. In response to the rapid growth of the university, CMU realized that its digital experience was not reflective of the university’s transformation and that a new website was needed to continue to attract students and engage alumni.
THE PROCESS
CMU and its branding agency enlisted the digital expertise of SilverTech for the technical portion of this project. Based on SilverTech’s status as a Titanium Partner on CMU’s chosen content management platform, Progress Sitefinity, and SilverTech’s successful history of partnering with advertising agencies, we were the perfect fit to take on this project.
SilverTech worked extensively with the branding agency to develop a new user experience strategy and integrate new UI/UX-informed website designs. The proposed website updates included improvements in usability, new conversion paths, personalization and optimized navigation. In-depth strategy sessions helped to identify exactly what the site lacked and what can be done to eliminate these deficits. The development and implementation of the new website was made efficient by SilverTech’s use of Microsoft DevOps. DevOps allows for cooperation between formerly siloed roles. Using DevOps enabled different teams, such as development and IT, to streamline processes and collaborate on various steps of the project. The CMU, SilverTech and mStoner teams highlighted the following challenges and goals for the
new website.
CHALLENGES
- Poor navigation
- Layout was not user friendly
- No event tracking
- Hard to find information
GOALS FOR NEW WEBSITE
- Improve the website for use as a recruitment tool
- Implement a new website platform that supports CMU’s needs now, as well as in the future
- Engage CMU faculty, staff and students in the design and assessment process
- Refine the web governance team and strategy
- Advance CMU’s brand and reputation, drive interactions among target audiences and reflect the university’s strategic plan and values
MODULES IN ACTION
OUR APPROACH
The Sitefinity content management system provides CMU with consistent and easy-to-use page templates and customized modules allowing the team to update the content as they see fit. Sitefinity also integrates with important platforms that incorporate course catalogs and site search on the website seamlessly. With the help of our expert Progress Sitefinity developers, SilverTech was able to train the CMU team on Sitefinity best practices to ensure the marketing team at CMU can perform routine site maintenance on their own.
NEW WEBSITE FEATURES
- Calendar – gives stakeholders the ability to submit events for approval and allows for events to be promoted on the CMU homepage
- Directory – is a custom content module that centrally stores and manages faculty members
- Course Catalog – integrates with the SmartCatalogIQ application as the course catalog system for CMU, including current and past course catalogs
- News - A dynamic module in which news articles or stories can be centrally managed and updated
- Blogs - a dynamic module that is stored within the CMS as a structured content type, where Blogs can be centrally written, edited and managed
- Alerts – allows CMU to post critical alerts and notifications in the global header
Programs - is a custom content module that allows CMU to centrally store and manage all programs along with their predefined data structure - Events – is centrally managed and constructed from Sitefinity’s out-of-the-box set of fields, allowing CMU to promote upcoming events to its users in an intuitive format
