McKelvey School of Engineering launches new website

The McKelvey School of Engineering has launched a redesigned website that offers a cleaner reading experience and more flexibility for users and keeps up with the latest technological standards.

The school’s Marketing & Communications team has been working behind the scenes on the redesigned site for nearly two years, said Vince Ruppert, senior web developer.

“The new site is more mobile-friendly with updated web standards,” Ruppert said. “There are new features that allow users to more easily contribute content and provides the flexibility to design new pieces.”

The previous website, launched in 2015, used the Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 content management system, which is nearing the end of its life and will no longer be supported by Microsoft.

“The new system will be constantly updated so we’ll always have the latest version and will be on the leading edge of features and functionality,” Ruppert said.

The McKelvey Engineering website had 1.1 million unique page views in the past 12 months, and nearly one-third of those visits were from mobile devices. The new content management system allows for more tracking and analytics and better transparency. In addition, the calendar is now part of the university’s Happenings calendar system, which uses the Localist community event platform, and uses the Funnelback internal search engine.

The team worked with Almanac, a St. Louis-based company, to develop the design, which features a clean design and an appearance that the content is without boundaries, similar in style and color scheme to some of the newer websites within the university.

Over the summer of 2020, the Marketing & Communications team migrated nearly 1,000 pages on the main website from the old system to the new, a figure that doesn’t include the web pages for each of the school’s departments.