New Home Page for School of Graduate Studies

Over the past few months we have been working to improve our home page to allow visitors a better and more efficient visit. We are excited to launch the new page today and invite you all to take a look and check out the new features and navigations. Feedback is welcome so feel free to leave a comment!

Here’s a sneak preview.

Are we content with the content?

So far this summer, The Graduate School has spent a good deal of time reviewing and updating information in My GradSpace. As I mentioned in a previous post, this means looking at the program descriptions and images for more than 100 graduate programs, reviewing and improving dozens of email messages and looking at ways to improve the information we offer about student services and campus life.

At the same time, we are also reviewing our website content and preparing this for a considerable overhaul in the next few months. Of course, it is easy to also make a wish list of the new information we believe is of interest to our graduate community, whether it is our own faculty, our student body or prospective students.  Our goal with the revisions is to build a “graduate community” and to provide a sense of belonging and identity to our creative scholarship and research activities. A centralized graduate school is often seen as an office that processes admissions and graduation, yet we are involved is so many other activities from scholarly events, to supporting faculty and student research.

Over the past three years, our dean has established a lecture series that highlights the research of young faculty members across all disciplines. These lectures are the keynote presentations during the annual Scholarly Forum, a campus-wide showcase of scholarship and research in our graduate community at UND. And to further recognize and record the work of our Dean’s Lecture Series faculty, we have created a new web page complete with the abstracts for those lectures.  This is another way we can continue to revise and renew our content and show prospect students a different aspect of the vibrant scholarship conducted at the University.

The new Dean’s Lecture Series page is only one of the new initiatives we’re developing.  We are also developing a site using Omeka to create an easy and interesting way to share stories from current and past graduate students. So stay tuned as we hope to launch Grad Stories in the coming weeks!

Analytics observations #1

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some data from a complete year of tracking our web site using Google Analytics. Collecting data is easy enough, but knowing how to use that data or determining what it means is another proverbial ballgame. Looking at the raw data such as the total number of pages viewed or the total number of visits can be rather impressive, but there is so much information we can glean from analyzing how people find our website and then, once there, how they use it. Looking at behaviors can drive decisions we make daily on the information we push up front, or the structure of our web site. Taking one example today, for instance, I can make the following assumptions:

Top Content

1. /dept/grad/
2. /html/admissionshome.html
3. /html/programs.html
4. /dept/grad/html/programs.html
5. /dept/grad/html/admissionshome.html
6. /html/landingpage-connect.html
7. /
8. /dept/grad/html/forms.html
9. /dept/grad/html/landingpage-connect.htm
10. 10.  /html/forms.html

The Content refers to the pages most visited by users of our site. The highest rated here is our homepage at 18.32% with the next four most frequently visited pages directed to the programs we offer and the admissions information for these programs. Of the ten most visited, eight are directly recruitment related – that is to say, providing information for prospective students on our graduate program offerings, admission requirements, and the process for inquiring and applying to the program.

The above “programs” hyperlink example is a significant one. This link on our navigation bar alphabetically lists all of the graduate programs by department. That makes sense. However, the hyperlink bounces away from our site to the department. This means for a visitor to find the appropriate information on our graduate program, that link has to be directed at an “external” link – ie: one which we have no control over and one that we hope is maintained and provides consistent information. We also risk losing their attention once they “bounce” from our site. This becomes a consideration for restructuring the site: change those hyperlinks to go to fact sheet information where we control the information.

Also rating in the top ten pages is that where we hold all of the forms for current students and faculty. These include all of the “business” items like programs of study, scholarships and graduation. Since Forms ranks so highly I am reminded of our internal processes!

To put the top 10 content links in context, Google Analytics has measured 472 pages on our site to date. And just for interest’s sake, the next 10 most frequently visited all relate to prospective students. If I am to base some assumptions on this activity I could argue that the greatest number of users of our website are searching for information designed for prospective students. This could influence HOW we present that information in a website redesign, making it more prominent or comprehensive. Furthermore, I can look at the least visited content and decide what prominence it should have.

Before making any major website structure changes, it will be important to look at the traffic pathways of those most visited pages: As an example, I’ll look at the same “top 10” and determine whether those visits come from direct sources, referred sources or search engines. But that’s next time!

One year on….

Last Tuesday marked a full year of tracking The Graduate School’s current Web site using Google Analytics. So I thought it would be fun to share some of these analyses. Although the following analyses do not represent all of the information we are able to glean, it does provide a fairly comprehensive look at our visitor, traffic sources and content. While this might look like just a list of numbers, I’ll offer some thoughts on each of these stats over the next week in an effort to provide some “end user” impact.

Total number of Visits 212, 167
Total number of Visitors 109,673
Total number of PageViews 585, 793
Pages/Visits 2.65
Average time on Site 2mins 43 sec

Top 10 Countries for Visits

1. United States                        191,895

2. India                                     5,269

3. Canada                     4,183

4. China                        2,501

5. Bangladesh               1,437

6. Nepal                        1,199

7. Iran                           1,116

8. Saudi Arabia             692

9. Nigeria                      689

10.Cameroon                662

Top 10 States in the USA for visits

1. North Dakota                       62,555
2. Minnesota                           42,892
3. California                            6,961
4. Texas                                 5,304
5. South Dakota                      3,990
6. Florida                                3,948
7. New York                            3,942
8. Wisconsin                           3,337
9. Colorado                            3,310

10.  Illinois                                 3,082

Traffic Sources

Referring Sites  60.66%

Direct Traffic     20.22%

Search Engines 19.09%

Other                0.02%

Top Content

1. /dept/grad/
2. /html/admissionshome.html
3. /html/programs.html
4. /dept/grad/html/programs.html
5. /dept/grad/html/admissionshome.html
6. /html/landingpage-connect.html
7. /
8. /dept/grad/html/forms.html
9. /dept/grad/html/landingpage-connect.html

10.  /html/forms.html

Top 10 Browsers

1. Internet Explorer

2. Firefox

3.  Safari

4. Chrome

5. Opera

6. Mozilla

7. Camino

8. Mozilla Compatible Agent

9. Opera Mini

10. BlackBerry9530

Top 10 Operating Systems

1. Windows                90.47%
2. Macintosh              8.55%
3. Linux                      0.58%
4. iPhone                   0.15%
5. (not set)                 0.09%
6. iPod                      0.08%
7. Blackberry              0.02%
8. Android                  0.02%
9. SunOS                   0.01%

10.  SymbianOS            0.01%