About Davidson.edu
The Davidson website is a key element of the college’s communication and marketing efforts and is an important vehicle for delivering information to the campus community, key stakeholders and other audiences.
The website is designed and architected to achieve the following goals:
- Showcases Davidson’s strengths, qualities and values, by showing — not just telling — the Davidson story.
- A site with a more modular, flexible visual design that allows our audiences to feel what makes our campus special and to witness our strong Davidson community, even before they step on campus.
- Targets prospective and current students and their families without sacrificing the needs of secondary audiences, including alumni, current and prospective faculty and staff members, media professional and the general public.
- Organizes content in an efficient and logical manner — one that is architecturally intuitive for primary audiences to navigate, but preserves deeper content structures to meet the needs of our secondary audiences.
- A technology platform that is robust, mobile-first in focus, fully responsive and ADA compliant, yet flexible enough to continue to grow and evolve with our content strategy and digital presence.
Homepage
The homepage is an immersive brand entry point primarily targeting prospective students, reinforcing known brand qualities while providing clear pathways and context to deeper understanding and discovery. The goal of the 2023 redesign was to keep pace with current design trends to promote user engagement.
Expandable Mega Menu
An expandable “mega menu” more quickly connect visitors to the content they’re looking for.
Based on data and analytics, users see a succinct list of options, by category, that take them directly to the information they want.
Content Management System
The content management system (CMS), for davidson.edu is Drupal. Drupal is a familiar and proven system, now in its eighth generation, and is widely used in higher education, since it is a leading open-source platform, with a vast community of developers, and a culture of idea-sharing and innovation.
Drupal’s flexible design, allows us to create and manage a wide variety of content types. It is highly customizable, which makes it easier to create features tailored for our site and to integrate third party functions.
High Level Routing Pages
Newly created high-level pages route users directly to the most sought-after content. These pages clear the path for users by gathering together like-content that is otherwise spread around different parts of the college.
Audience Gateways
We’ve added these pages under Tools and Resources for to aggregate the most visited content links for each audience. We surfaced the three most important daily links for audiences as calls to action at the top of each page. Next, based on user research, we categorized important links into lists, which is how users prefer to find information on this kind of page.
Majors, Minors & Programs
This page provides an all-encompassing visual aggregation of all majors, minors, interdisciplinary minors and programs with direct links to their corresponding department pages.
Individual Majors & Minors pages have been streamlined to exclude catalog information, so prospective students can get a snapshot of what different majors offer without being overwhelmed with details that do not apply to them.
Additional Resources
