Western University launches new website

Following a year-long process of online surveys, stakeholder consultations and usability studies, Western University launched its redesigned website this morning at www.westernu.ca

“The previous design had been tweaked over the past few years, but was in need of a significant overhaul,” says Terry Rice, Western’s Marketing and Creative Services Director. “Our website is such an important tool for telling the Western story. Whether it’s a prospective student thinking about applying here or faculty member thinking about working here, the site serves many audiences and it’s critical that we have a design that is engaging, clean and, above all, user-friendly.”

Some new features include:

•    Access to the most frequently used websites (including Western’s directory) from a ribbon that is constant across all new websites that use the same template;
•    A rotating banner that will feature big news stories, recruitment activities, research stories, as well as athletic and cultural events;
•    The main website navigation is now in a “mega-nav” format, which streamlines access to the most-visited pages;
•    On second-level pages, the secondary navigation is moving from the right to the left, which will be more intuitive for people.

Western launched its first website in 1997 and has seen six full redesigns and countless tweaks since its inception.

Over the last year, Western’s homepage boasted more than 6.6 million visits by more than 1.8 million unique visitors.

A majority of the 6.6 million visits are from Canada but a number come from around the globe, including 180,980 from the United States, 95,614 from China, 34,838 from India and 31,135 from the United Kingdom.

Social media has also become an ever-increasing driver of traffic to the website as nearly 16,000 visits came in from Facebook, 2,677 from Twitter and 2,067 from LinkedIn.

Those visitors viewed more than 9.4 million pages, averaging 1.42 pages and more than three minutes per visit.