As mobile use surges, our partners at Texas Wesleyan University are making a strong commitment to be mobile-friendly. In partnership with Sanmita, Texas Wesleyan is upgrading its entire website to adapt to any device and screen size. We are thrilled to do more with our excellent partners at Texas Wesleyan!
Sanmita is redeveloping the underlying architecture of the Texas Wesleyan website to allow the entire site to be responsive. This is our latest project with Texas Wesleyan as the school upgrades its web products. Recently, Sanmita converted the university’s homepage and admissions section to be responsive. We are also developing an interactive calendar feature that will have the look and feel of a mobile app. The calendar will be integrated into the website, eliminating any obstacle of downloading an app to use the feature.
Texas Wesleyan’s moves come at a time when it is critical for higher education to be mobile-friendly. Mobile is becoming an essential tool in higher ed marketing and recruiting. A survey of college students shows 89% own a smartphone. Younger Americans are increasingly using their mobile devices for web browsing; In 2013, 68% of prospective students said they visited college websites on a mobile device. A responsive site helps ensure these mobile-savvy students will have a positive user experience and easily access essential information. Texas Wesleyan University understands these trends and wants its website to meet these demands.
Texas Wesleyan started its move to responsive design with its homepage and Admissions section, the two most popular destinations on most higher ed websites. We accomplished this by using Sanmita’s exclusive Smart Filter responsive design tool. With our tool, we can take any website and make it responsive. We accomplish this in less time and at a lower cost than it would take to redesign an entire website to be responsive. And our technology works with any content management system (CMS). The Sanmita team can even handle the implementation for a client on their CMS. With Texas Wesleyan, for example, we implemented the responsive tool on the school’s current CMS.
In many cases, when Sanmita upgrades a site to be responsive, the entire website is converted at once. Texas Wesleyan is in a unusual situation because each page on its site is unique. That requires each site to be converted individually to responsive design. But we believe it is worth the effort!
In our experience working with higher ed sites, the most important pages for mobile are a school’s homepage and admissions. Other key sections include: Alumni, Areas of Academic Study, Campus Safety, Campus Life, Financial Aid, Athletics, Contact/About Us and Career Placement. On the new Texas Wesleyan sites, mobile users will see four categories in the top navigation: the homepage, News/Events, Admissions and an emergency alert section.
We look forward to continuing our work with Texas Wesleyan. Contact Sanmita to see how we can help your school become mobile-friendly!