The Challenge

Carson-Newman College has long held a stellar reputation for being an upstanding spiritual and community leader. Now they are taking that fight to the web with the launch of a brand new website.

A common struggle faced by all colleges and universities is complexity. It's a nearly unmanageable problem that spills over into the world-wide web. Yes, in many ways the internet has made many common problems much easier to deal with thanks to advancing technology, ease-of-use and wide-spread dissemination of newly available tools. But with every solution a new problem is created.

Carson-Newman needed a new web presence that would allow them to truly cater to their target demographics. All of that while allowing multiple departments to administrate all aspects of their website, while still maintaining their brand throughout.

The Solution

Overcoming the first challenge was a (relatively) easy one. Despite the incredible man-hours involved in completely rebuilding any college or university website in another programming language, it's more a problem of time, energy and resources than anything else. But how do you keep your information relevant? By keeping in mind just who it is you are speaking to... and telling them only those things most relevant to them.

For colleges and universities, they have to speak to a diverse audience with distinctively different needs: Prospective students need to be able to easily glean information about student life, academic programs, financial aid and more. Current students have different needs like exploring majors or classes to chart the course of their education, accessing library or IT information, or working with administrative offices like Financial Aid or the Registrar's office. Finally, both current students and alumni have a need to show their pride by keeping in touch with the schools sports programs.

Now that you know the people you're speaking to and what they care about, it's time to get to work. Human communication is a problem all its own. Organization is often the key: assembling bits of information in the proper sequence so that everything makes sense and meaning is conveyed.

For Carson-Newman, that meant a complete re-visioning of the their site's navigation. A beautiful, daily changing home page now greets visitors and keeps the site fresh each day. From the home page, viewers can navigate according to either their role as future student, current student, faculty or alumni or take a more task-based approach to finding what they are looking for by choosing from categories like academics, administration, admissions, athletics or auxiliary services.

Dynamic, sticky bread-crumb navigation allows site users to keep their finger on just what they are looking at and where they are in the site. No more random in-page links leading you to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-like dead-ends.

Having fully organized and envisioned an incredible strategy for tackling the daunting organizational task of create such a monumental website, things got down to brass tacks with tactical decisions like how to realistically implement and manage such a wide-spread system in an administrative environment where not everyone has web-abilities and coordination among departments is no easy task.

You know your audience, you've got your message and its clearly organized - now how do you deliver and make your dream a reality?

In an administrative environment, coordination is the key and each department must be empowered to manage their own dealings while coordinating with the organization at large. Enter TradeMark Advertising's latest proprietary website management system, Hands On Content Management.

The Results

Multi-level administrative controls allow relevant administrators access to just the areas they need to keep current. And by making updating easier than ever, the Carson-Newman site is sure to stay fresh and relevant for years to come.

Winner Carson-Newman versus Informational Disorganization & Confusion - A solid victory for administrators, viewers & users everywhere!