Southeast Missouri State University will be getting a new website in 2020.
Plans were presented to make changes to the website at the Board of Regents meeting on May 10.
Director of university marketing, Tonya Wells, said they hope to award a contract for the project in June while they work to create new content for the site, while also carrying over some existing content.
“This will be a very big project that will touch almost all members of the Southeast community,” Wells said. “We’ve never actually invested any dollars in our website. It’s always kind of been a homegrown website.”
The project does not have a budget yet, and they’re still in the process of looking for firms to assist with redesigning and assessing their proposals.
“Because of various factors, in order to bring it more in line with search engine optimization and to support some of our digital efforts, we really need a whole new website redesign,” she said.
Wells said one of the major issues at hand with the current website’s layout is how it fails to attract major search engine attention because it “was built and written before the advent of search engines almost.”
The goal is to realign the website so that Southeast ranks among the websites of universities students peruse when looking at higher education in Missouri and certain degree programs. Another thing that factors in is how the website is revised so that the university can align the content with what viewers are looking for.
She said the new website will also be more refined, and the content will be revised.
“We do want to bring it more in line with Southeast’s brand,” said Wells. “We’ve done a good job undergoing our brand launch several years ago of carrying that through on campus and in our publications, our advertising, [and] our video. The website presented a bit of a challenge because of its medium and just because of how large it is.”
The new appearance of the website has not yet been determined.
The scope of the redesign will be limited to University’s public website, and will not affect student’s education sites such as Moodle or the Semo Portal.
“It is a complete overhaul,” said Wells. “This will be a big project for the university and for University Marketing in the next year.”