Jump to a topic to read all the relevant recommendations from that phase:
This research is the first step in building a diagram of what we need to do in order to build a better next generation website.
“Content” overall is a reoccurring theme in the feedback. Specifically, users mention outdated information, unexpected information, or just simply too much information.
During the period the survey was live, the largest group of respondents were parents/grandparents/guardians. Since this group tends to be older, it isn’t a surprise there were more accessibility related feedback.
TTU should consider how the bright color in the red is used, how the navigation works, and the website displays for mobile devices in the next generation of the website.
By percentage, the respondents indicated they were interested in:
This response aligns with other data that we’ve collected in the audit and also aligns with our in-person sessions as well.
There were many comments, mostly from current students and parents, about the many different portals that are available. Specifically, the names of the portals seem to cause confusion about their content and what purpose they serve.
While TTU does not differ from other universities and their vast ecosystem of internal systems, we should consider simplifying how your audiences find and log into these platforms.
Small adjustments into how analytics reports data (full URL, event conversion tracking, demographics) could help tell a more accurate story of user behavior.
Specifically, the conversion tracking can help with illustrating user funnels and show what users did on the website before performing a key action.
In 2025, online programs and the marketing around those options have been particularly strong. The $10,000 online degree seems to be extremely popular with your audiences across the board.
The online degree market is extremely competitive, and connecting your analytics to the online degree program CRM can help the TTU marketing team make adjustments/tweaks during campaigns to stay in front of the competition.
Internal search shows similar trends in behavior compared to our other research. Tuition/cost, financial aid, scholarships and majors are all critical content for non-current students.
It is important to note that there is a relationship between the keywords tuition, cost, financial aid and scholarships. These are all related to paying for an education, and depending on where a student (or parent) may be in the journey could determine the phrasing used.
Full URL paths may need to be implemented in the future to distinguish between many depts.ttu.edu websites with similar URL paths. For example, the homepage of most websites will simply report at “/” but it isn’t clear what website it is from.
Conversion tracking (key events) should be implemented once we can track true conversions in the CRM (RFI, Visit Forms, Admissions, Donate, etc.) This will help us determine the efficacy of paid marketing efforts vs. organic.
We also reviewed analytics for sites in the Content Audit.
It is clear observing the behavior of your users on the old templates vs. the new templates (online) that the improvements have made a big difference. The scrollmaps indicate users are reading a larger chunk of the content and the clickmaps indicate good engagement on the “dead-end” pages.
The homepage of any university is always a strong focal point. However, engagement rates on the page always raise questions to what users actually want to see. For example, the audience selector “I Am A....” is a fantastic idea that technically would resolve some of the feedback we received in the survey, but it is curious that we have less than 1% engagement on that section of the website. TTU may have a case to explore a more simplified homepage that treats the experience as more of a dashboard or jumping off point.
The recording of the student on their mobile device shows a great example of the pathway of high-school student / incoming freshman. Starting from the homepage, they immediately look for scholarships. They use the website’s internal search functionality to look for tuition and cost but does not seem to find exactly what they are looking for. At the end, they finally find the page with the Resident/Non-Resident costs laid out in the table.
The clickmaps show that in almost every instance, if “Programs” or “Academics” or “Majors” were an option in the navigation, it was always a Top 2 link. Through observing recordings, this is most likely due to users not finding the program pages for their desired major unless they were trying to find an online program. In some cases, you have to either navigate to the School/College or the Admissions page to find the correct location.
The recording of the prospective online student shows how someone is using the new filters on the online degree program pages. In that example, they are trying to determine whether or not their program qualifies as “Online+” or just regular “Online”. You can see them search and filter multiple times but it isn’t clear through observing if they figured out how it works.
The students we were able to speak to (although it was not many), confirmed that their prospective journey was pretty simple.
The students indicated that the many portals and platforms were very frustrating - especially during the “Admitted” process where they were trying to finalize becoming a student. One thing of note that all students repeated is that once they reached a real person, the process was a lot easier. It is also of note that the efficiency of the Admissions process is a huge boon to TTU. Fast decisions clearly help students make an easier decision. Overall, they just want to know.
This may be one of the first times we’ve seen a robot be selected as a top audience but it makes sense. Prospective students and parents today rely on Gemini, ChatGPT and other technologies to give them simple and quick readouts of the information they want.
Getting the exact output without having to scan the entire website is appealing and saves a lot of time. This puts pressure on the marketing team to make sure the website serves the most up-to-date information in a way that’s appealing to people AND robots.
These students were sharp. They understood the concept of a net price but they were more interested in the process of getting to the net price. TTU’s scholarships, especially for in-state, bordering and international students are incredible. Once that formula is figured out for those that qualify, it’s a huge driver.
This was also apparent on the tour during the presentation.
A lot of universities understand the importance of outcomes. Not just going to college for the experience but knowing that there has to be a job at the end of the journey (or a least a high chance of a job.)The TTU students were really interested in outcomes. But it also seems that they took extra steps to verify that by looking deeper into alumni and the jobs they had. The new program pages do a great job of showcasing job and salary data but this is a great opportunity for the other trad. programs as well.
Just in our preliminary research, we can start to see the outline of the prospective student journey. There is a lot of nuance to the overall end goal of applying and becoming a student, but it still very simple.
Cost, Majors, Fit.
If we answer these questions along their journey, and simplify how they receive that information - TTU will have a better chance of converting more Red Raiders (and robots.)
See the Journey Map for details about our customer journey recommendations.
TTU’s paid campaigns are clearly driving a large amount of traffic to the website - especially towards online degree programs. The question remains on whether the incoming traffic is qualified traffic. Identifying the areas of interest for your paid traffic is key and will allow TTU to make adjustments to the spend, keywords and tactics that will make your marketing apparatus more efficient.
Connecting your CRM to analytics will make this goal a lot easier.
The Texas Tech University campus in the largest campus in the U.S. But the website does not have to be. The data suggests that a simpler website will provide a huge sigh of relief to your users (and web managers!).
It will be important through our work to identify all of the content you don't need and remove it if all possible. By working through the identified customer journey, this will help make that task easier.
It’s a feeling you that you know it when you see it. The website is only a small part of the vibe but it’s important to think about where prospectives begin to understand what TTU is all about.
A good place to start is the tour that can be an AHA moment for a lot of students. The virtual tour should support the in-person tour. Where are the moments that a tour guide stops and shows you something incredible? Are those moments available anywhere else? How do we capture that magic?
On & On...
To help define a technology roadmap, we evaluated your CMS and related technologies, researched potential search vendors, mapped existing CRM tools, and considered the competitive landscape.
1. Leverage Taxonomy Tags
There are currently 2,000+ tags in the system now. Use these strategically: administrate their creation and use. Build a meaningful term hierarchy, then use it to find and serve content.
2. Start Organizing Assets & Components
The current CMS has 299 assets and 129 components. That's not necessarily a lot, especially for a site this size, but many are named and associated with specific sites and aren't for general use.
Weed components with duplicate purpose/functionality. Generalize specific assets and components. Decouple assets and components from specific sites, and associate with features. For example, revise “College of Engineering CTA” to “CTA with [feature]." Encourage the use of assets and components amongst web editors on all sites, and use them to model DRY (don't repeat yourself) habits.
3. Review Users & Groups
There are currently 828 CMS users in 924 groups. Almost all users have Level 8 / “Designer” access to the CMS. Could we leverage the other levels to support enforcement of web standards? Are groups being utilized effectively? The group-to-user ratio seems off.
Given your team’s familiarity and history with Modern Campus, it’s hard to make a reasonable argument against keeping it. We’d recommend switching only if Modern Campus failed to meet your technological goals.
If you did switch to a new CMS, Drupal is likely the best alternative. We recommend test-driving Drupal on a microsite or small project before committing to a full rebuild.
Based on our evaluation of seven search vendors, Cludo is our recommended search tool.
Data & Strategy: The insights you’ll gain from the reporting tools will be valuable as you work toward improving content strategy.
Control & Intervention: Cludo will give you tools to wrangle search queries and own the search journey while you work on detangling your content.
Tech focus: Cludo is an actively developed tool with good documentation and support resources. Some highlights from the product roadmap include: React component library, conversion funnel tool.
Share the CRM map with Enrollment Management and confirm the details are correct.
Share the map with your Salesforce account team. Are there any areas where we could reduce redundant tools, or eliminate manual data entry?
Background: Additional Tech Areas
Career Pathways
Our student KJ sessions showed this content is important to prospective students, and validated the implementation of the widget. The widget itself is accessible, scalable, and straightforward to theme. We recommend you continue to roll this out to program pages beyond Online+.
Course Catalog
Modern Campus has a Widget API that allows you to connect to your catalog data and embed it elsewhere on your site. We recommend using this API to serve details about degree paths and key courses directly from the catalog on pages where it’s strategically advantageous to do so. Objective: avoid repetition, outdated content, and reduce editor workload.
Some third party tools and subscriptions in use across TTU sites may be redundant or unnecessary. We recommend evaluating third party apps and tools in use across all sites in a "Rocket Money" style audit. This may help us identify redundancies and consolidate where possible. The savings on subscriptions and implementation time could be used to invest in strategic areas like search analytics.
Newly admitted students are overwhelmed by the many sign ups and portals involved in the onboarding process. While this is not technically "the website," it's part of their experience and they don't differentiate it. We recommend a deeper audit into these tools to see if this can be streamlined, or if there's a better way to guide students through the process.
We recommend a move to cloud hosting from on-site servers.Continue to explore Modern Campus hosting. A separate enterprise hosting vendor is a good idea if you want to host non-Modern Campus sites. If so, we recommend Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, or Azure. We have not evaluated these vendors with a TTU-specific rubric like CMS and search, but this is an option for future research.
Your team's technical knowledge: it is an asset to have the institutional knowledge of many long-term staff members who understand how we got here. They have a deep familiarity with Modern Campus and with TTU's technical history. Continue investing here: Shadowing for new or reassigned staff, continue professional development: conferences, training, etc.
Global Template Process: Continue with this concept, but expand:
Offering a design system that is system-agnostic and powered by design tokens will empower site owners to tell their story within the bounds of brand guidelines and code standards. Similar to the global template, such a system can be developed iteratively and strategically applied to existing sites over time.
Build your Modern Campus assets & components from design system elements. Slowly replace old assets and components by equipping web teams across campus to leverage the design system themselves.
What does that workflow look like?
Ideally: all code lives in version control, and that version-controlled code is deployed to the site’s staging and production servers automatically. Site editors don’t touch code or styles. A robust design system addresses their site’s needs and content strategy, and they leverage the system’s components via Modern Campus’s layout and component infrastructure. Large campus entities with their own brand identities can make significant thematic adjustments via design tokens without code repetition. The web team within Marketing & Communications maintains and expands the system, evangelizes it to the community, and facilitates adoption. The design system is decoupled from Modern Campus so it can be consumed by other systems.
Also every day there’s a rainbow and all admitted students are issued a unicorn.
This is a long term goal. The path to that ideal is not easy or short, but it is possible.
As with content governance, a strict workflow should be enforced when pushing code to the site. It is possible to do this without having to be a big mean jerk about it.
Define the rules, then set up technologies to automate their enforcement. Utilize linters, branch protection rules, and integration tests. Publish the what and why. Make it clear to contributors what the rules are. Share why you have that rule: what (or who) it protects or serves. Consider enforcement as a teaching tool for the community. Connect and demonstrate how “following the rules” leads to sites that achieve their department’s goals.
A design system carefully implemented within your CMS will put the right tools close at hand. Providing good, functional tools with clear documentation and training will make site owners more likely to do the right thing by default.
Objective: foster a community where web editors on campus want to come to you for advice, best practices, and training. Be seen as a empathetic, helpful, uniting resource, not a controlling entity doling out rules and rejecting pull requests (even when you are).
This is already a path you’re on. It’s possible that you’re already there. Continue inviting the community into the process with Teams chat, quarterly meetings, and available documentation.
This phase of the audit included content audits and research into specific sites selected by the Marketing team. Each site was the subject of its own standalone audit, including heatmaps, user recordings, and content strategy.
Background: Research and Innovation Site
The Office of Research and Innovation’s landing page does not contain any copy or content that indicates what the website or department does. The main images showcase the latest news but the “How Can We Help?” is geared towards an internal audience only. The navigation reveals over 25 different paths to take located in different sections of the research website and can be overwhelming.
The Office of Research and Innovation website offers a robust set of helpful links, forms, information and contacts for anyone looking. However, it does not sell the university’s strength in research. A revised website for the Office of Research should take cues from the Strategic Research and Innovation Hub’s pages deeper within its architecture to help market TTU.
Due to the various uses of the TTU design system, it is difficult to tell where you are. Each department within the Office of Research has its own approach to design and content leading to some web pages with only text, and other pages with an exceptionally modern (and never before seen) design system. This problem is exacerbated by the over-reliance on the navigation drop-down system to house links within the site (especially when the links open new windows.)
Background: College of Engineering Site
With only using an automated accessibility checker, the current CoE pages could pass minimum accessibility standards, but examining the pages more closely (in particular on mobile) reveals severe usability and accessibility issues. Hidden content behind flip cards, inability to click on mobile, and sticky navs prevent some users from being able to fully read important content related to academic programs.
Globally, the TTU.edu website will send users to the catalog for course related information on the main academic page. The CoE has their own dedicated program pages for their content that also directs users to the catalog page. In addition, there are calls-to-action like apply, request information and contact that make it unclear who exactly the student is contacting: the College of Engineering or TTU Admissions.
There are several instances on the CoE where an entire page of information is duplicated, in particular information related to prospective students. While direct links may be provided to more specific content, single pages are created with more links to the same content. In addition, the usage of the navigation drop-down, in-page links, and secondary navigation creates search overload with your users.
The College of Engineering (and various other colleges) have several design systems embedded within its own architecture. The high-level pages (CoE) are based on templates that are a different version than the departmental pages (The Department of Computer Science, etc).Since the subset of available templates and content types are so large, it is difficult for web editors to adhere to a standard when building pages for their respective departments.
Background: Online+ Program Pages
Program pages are what we consider to be “dead end” pages. In other words, your audience has found one of the main pieces of information they were looking for when they first arrived (i.e. Cost, Majors, Fit).
These pages can be much longer and dense than other pages on the website since the user will most likely read everything. The clickmap and scrollmap indicate that not all content is being engaged with but may also indicate there could be other opportunities. In this case, AB test potential changes to the page instead of making wholesale updates.
All available data, including GA4 and heatmaps, indicate that the Online+ program pages are highly effective. In fact, we would recommend that on-campus program pages have a similar layout that includes the same available information. While the “time to purchase” for an Online degree is much shorter, the information your prospective students need is exactly the same.
Background: Hospitality, Housing, and Student Life Sites
Each site has its own unique design quirks but no singular site made us think “Why is this here?”
In particular, the Housing site does everything it is supposed to do and more. The virtual tours of the dorm rooms are thoughtful and detailed and give the students (especially international students) a better look behind the scenes. The content on all of these sites feel the most “authentic” to the student and could be because a student wrote the content.
Thinking about the prospective student journey, we know that students are very interested in the dorms (especially the cost), food, athletics, and other accommodations. However, these sites serve a very particular purpose with the current student in mind. In the recordings and page flows we examined, prospective students rarely find these websites unless there is something transactional they need to do. It would be interesting to think about how to pull some of the culture and life these pages bring to content in other sections on the Admissions and Academic pages.
