New sites for prospective undergraduates, postgraduates and international students

Yesterday, we launched our new student recruitment websites, for undergraduate, postgraduate and international students.

Before:

After:

What's changed?

More obvious next steps and calls to action

In the old design, key tasks like booking on an open day or ordering a printed prospectus were a bit buried in long and complicated menus. We've hopefully made it a lot more obvious how to complete these essential tasks.

Quicker and clearer paths to course information

Our research showed us that a lot of people were having trouble finding out if we even offered the course that they wanted to study. 

On the old site, you'd have to go through roughly the following process to find a course:

Finding a course on the old site

The problem wasn't only the number of steps involved, but also the fact that you're thrown off the scent when you go from the programme listing to a departmental homepage, and then have to navigate through a departmental website to find the course again.

On the new site, you can now search straight from the undergraduate homepage, by course title, keywords or UCAS code. The search results will take you directly to course information on departmental sites, rather than homepages.

Content about the city of York

One of the big attractions of coming to study at York is the fact that you get to live in a rather nice historic city, that's also got plenty going on. Our old site didn't really reflect this at all, so we've expanded on the images and content we have about the city, working in partnership with Visit York.


New colours

The colours used on the web now match the colours used in the printed prospectus, so the two now look a lot more related to each other.

Videos

The set of official videos are now a lot more visible in high profile spots around the site. In places we've also linked through to video content created by the Students' Union. In future phases we hope to expand on the amount of student-generated content we have on the site.

More to come

That's just a taster of some of the new content. There's a lot more besides, and more planned for future phases. We'll continue to work with colleagues in Student Recruitment and Admissions on expanding and improving on the site over the coming months.