We (Tyndale Admissions & Marketing) have decided to defer the public launch of our new website to the week of July 1, 2009. The reasons for this change of the public launch date are:

1. The new public launch date will give us more time to carefully engage the thoughts and concerns of the Tyndale Community. This is especially related to the ongoing discussions concerning the nature of the institution and the proposed marketing language of the website.

2. The new launch time will enable us to have more content ready for the public launch. The various development phases of the website rebuild will not be delayed.

3. We will be able to have dispersed training for content managers to these times: June, September and October.

We want to reassure the Tyndale community that the new website will still be up and ready to impact the incoming class of Fall 2010.

Last Sunday night the 81st annual Academy Awards took place awarding Oscars to actors, writers, animators and other movie industry people. Personally — I could care less — I didn’t watch a second of it!

On the drive in this morning Phil and I were talking about awards shows and it got me thinking about industry awards — and more specifically website awards. There are lots of websites that are there only to showcase and/or judge other websites. EduStyle.net is a great example. Webmasters post there site designs for the community to critique and users can vote with a thumbs up or thumbs down. EduCheckup.com does video reviews of university websites — here is a review of the current tyndale.ca. Of course there is also the webpagesthatsuck.com awards — don’t want to win that one!

Now if Tyndale were to win an award — what would I want the award for? I do like our design, we have some pretty good copy. Most of our recent photos have been stunning. Our php and html code is clean and correct — what about awards for these? Well those are all fine and good — but the award I would cherish the most wold be an award for usability.

David Beyer of the Academica Group said it best when he said

“In order to make Tyndale’s web presence a success we must understand and follow website best practices and this key guiding principle — websites must answer the needs of the users first.”

» Continue reading “Website Usability – and the award goes to…”

No— Nehemiah is not a new member of the web development team — in fact — I don’t think he has even heard of the “web”. You see, Nehemiah lived some 400 years before Christ. I guess I am really here to introduce The Nehemiah Project — not Nehemiah himself.

The Nehemiah Project is a project to rebuild the foundation of Tyndale’s main website. Like in the story of Nehemiah (a biblical character from the old testament) — the foundation of Tyndale’s website needs some attention.

Over the last number of years there has been tremendous growth in prospective students using the Internet to aid them in their choice of post-secondary schools. Keeping in step with this trend, Tyndale has been investing great efforts to provide our future students with the information and site features that they both need and want. We have grown.

Tyndale started it’s web presence in 1996 with a few pages explaining who we were and how to contact us if you had questions. Today we have about 14,000 items indexed by Google and somewhere in the range of 6000 – 7000 pages of information — all being managed by 40+ web content managers.

With rapid growth comes increased complexity. Although our current home built content management system (DPA) has served us well over the years — but we have out grown it. It is time to rebuild.

I am introducing this project to you today, but it has been in the works for about a year now. We have gone through an extensive Request for Proposal (RFP) process. We received, reviewed and ranked a number of great responses. Along with the Web Steering Committee, we selected our vendor. We have initiated the research and are reexamining all of our Information Architecture (I/A) — we are well on the way to a successful relaunch of www.tyndale.ca

Watch this blog for more information on the project including updates and opportunities for you to give feedback.

A newly developed website (started October 2008) features Nick DeNardis on video doing live reviews of academic websites. Nick, a Web Developer from Wayne State University, has a keen eye for what students are looking for and reviews these websites from their perspective.

Last week I had submitted Tyndale’s website for review. On Friday Nick did a live review of www.tyndale.ca. Websites are scores in three areas – Visual, Information and Code. We scored an overall 88% (B+) with visual getting an 80%, information getting an 85% and code scoring a 99% – hey nobody is perfect

As we embark on a website redesign project, Nick’s review will be quite helpful. Most of the negative comments he pointed out have already been identified as area to work on but it is nice to have them confirmed.

Watch the video below and then leave me a comment. What would you like to see changed on Tyndale’s website? Do you think Nick was wrong on any points? What did he miss?

In a recent post I talked about design and how we see design in a lot of things including XHTML/PHP/CSS  code. Smashing Magazine published an article today titled “12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean“. The article lays out some very good concepts that should be viewed as best practices for modern web development.

So if code is your thing or you would like to spend a few minutes trying to figure out why web developers have to deal with – swing by and see what you think.

Up From Last October Down From Last October

Overall Web Site Facts

• We had over 36,200 visits
• We had an average of 1170 visits per day with our highest day (20th) having 1600 visits
• We had 640,200 pages viewed by those visitors
• Visitors came from 127 different countries covering most continents
• The top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) hit our web site to index our pages over 98,000 times
• 3.7% of our traffic came directly from search engines with Google alone accounting for over 13,000 hits

University College Future Student Micro-Site Facts

• We had about 2,500 visits
• We had an average of 79.97 visits per day
• We had 9,974 pages viewed by those visitors
• Visitors came from 71 different countries covering most continents
• 60.91% of the visitors were new visits
• Visitors used 6 different operating systems ranging from Windows and Mac to the iPhone and iPod Touch
• 60 people completed an inquiry form online
• 21 people registered for campus visits online

Seminary Future Student Micro-Site Facts

• We had about 1,600 visits
• We had an average of 49.90 visits per day
• We had 5,201 pages viewed by those visitors
• Visitors came from 59 different countries covering most continents
• 56.17% of the visitors were new visits
• 30 people completed an inquiry form online
• 20 people registered for campus visits online

Compiled November 5, 2008 by Andrew Smith, Admissions and Marketing

Today Tyndale launched a new Online Application. (http://apply.tyndale.ca)

A recent study (Engaging the “Social Networking” Generation E-Expectations: Class of 2007 Report (PDF)) places Online applications as the 3rd most requested activity students would like to complete on a College or University web site. 81% of respondents said they would like to complete their application online.

While we have had an online application available for over six years – this application was being hosted off-site and the information gathered had to be re-entered into our database system. This solution created extra work  and left a lot of room for human error. Using a third-party vendor also comes at a cost – a charge for each application received.

Our new Online Application – code named “app|app”  –  is integrated directly with our prospective student database. This means that the information that the student enters will – once checked – be inserted directly into the main database. The database will automatically check for duplicate records helping us to keep our data clean and our communications effective.

To begin a new application the prospective student only needs to provide their first name, last name and email along with which school the wish to apply to. Once they have started their application they are able to save it at any point and return to complete it later. » Continue reading “New Tyndale Online Application”