Palm Beach Atlantic University
Palm Beach Atlantic University’s (PBA) previous site steered undergraduate and graduate prospects to separate websites, confusing users and making graduate programs hard to find. The strategic plan merged the sites and put PBA’s full range of programs front and center.
Up to 133%↑
Increase in Traffic to Key Academic Programs
20%↑
Increase in Traffic to Comprehensive Program Listing
38%↑
Overall Increase in Traffic
A top Florida Christian university, PBA offers nearly 120 degree programs—bachelors, master’s, doctoral, and dual degrees—at its main campus in West Palm Beach, a second campus in Orlando, and online.
The university’s primary website addressed only traditional undergraduate options, routing graduate, evening, and online prospects to a separate domain. The result: confusing navigation, duplicate content, and a lack of visibility for in-demand programs in fields such as nursing and pharmacy.
PBA’s sites also lagged behind in overall recruitment marketing in terms of message and visuals, and the university’s web team had outgrown their content management system. Stamats set out to develop a single cohesive experience that conveyed the institution’s breadth, update PBA’s online look and feel, and help make the transition to a new CMS.
Based on a long-term partnership, the Stamats team recommended the following goals for a ground-up reimagining of the PBA website:
- Integrating PBA’s separate sites into a unified online marketing hub with consistent, streamlined navigation
- Creating an interactive, one-stop shop for all academic programs, with filters for interests, degree levels, and other criteria
- Emphasizing prospective students of all types (while offering points of connection for other audiences)
- Modernizing design, user experience, and brand messaging, including new interactive and multimedia features
- Enhancing responsive design, all-around mobile performance, and accessibility
- Building flexible, modular page templates and transitioning to a new content management system
With a sense of urgency to transition from their current CMS, PBA needed an agile plan to “lift and shift” their current site to their new CMS (Omni Update’s OU Campus) while beginning the redesign. Stamats devised a plan with the university and Omni Update to not only transition the site but to map to a completely new information architecture, fresh design and front-end code, all while optimizing over 100 pages of content.
The three-way partnership continued through launch of a comprehensive new site. Situated in a beautiful location, the site highlights this distinction and portrays an immediate perception of beauty and diversity. With background video and interactive features highlighting these landscapes, the home-page visitor is guided to a comprehensive program tool (with optimized program-detail pages) and presents PBA as dynamic institution serving students of all types.
A prominent home-page showcase and one-click main-menu access to the PBA program list have boosted traffic to the list by about 20 percent. Traffic to the main page for PBA’s School of Pharmacy—previously housed under a secondary domain—has doubled, while traffic to pages for the MBA, Doctor of Nursing Practice, and BSN programs are up 18 to 133 percent.
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The Challenge
A top Florida Christian university, PBA offers nearly 120 degree programs—bachelors, master’s, doctoral, and dual degrees—at its main campus in West Palm Beach, a second campus in Orlando, and online.
The university’s primary website addressed only traditional undergraduate options, routing graduate, evening, and online prospects to a separate domain. The result: confusing navigation, duplicate content, and a lack of visibility for in-demand programs in fields such as nursing and pharmacy.
PBA’s sites also lagged behind in overall recruitment marketing in terms of message and visuals, and the university’s web team had outgrown their content management system. Stamats set out to develop a single cohesive experience that conveyed the institution’s breadth, update PBA’s online look and feel, and help make the transition to a new CMS.
-
The Project
Based on a long-term partnership, the Stamats team recommended the following goals for a ground-up reimagining of the PBA website:
- Integrating PBA’s separate sites into a unified online marketing hub with consistent, streamlined navigation
- Creating an interactive, one-stop shop for all academic programs, with filters for interests, degree levels, and other criteria
- Emphasizing prospective students of all types (while offering points of connection for other audiences)
- Modernizing design, user experience, and brand messaging, including new interactive and multimedia features
- Enhancing responsive design, all-around mobile performance, and accessibility
- Building flexible, modular page templates and transitioning to a new content management system
With a sense of urgency to transition from their current CMS, PBA needed an agile plan to “lift and shift” their current site to their new CMS (Omni Update’s OU Campus) while beginning the redesign. Stamats devised a plan with the university and Omni Update to not only transition the site but to map to a completely new information architecture, fresh design and front-end code, all while optimizing over 100 pages of content.
The three-way partnership continued through launch of a comprehensive new site. Situated in a beautiful location, the site highlights this distinction and portrays an immediate perception of beauty and diversity. With background video and interactive features highlighting these landscapes, the home-page visitor is guided to a comprehensive program tool (with optimized program-detail pages) and presents PBA as dynamic institution serving students of all types.
-
The Results
A prominent home-page showcase and one-click main-menu access to the PBA program list have boosted traffic to the list by about 20 percent. Traffic to the main page for PBA’s School of Pharmacy—previously housed under a secondary domain—has doubled, while traffic to pages for the MBA, Doctor of Nursing Practice, and BSN programs are up 18 to 133 percent.
