We sat down with Ty Stapleton, Web Writer and Content Architect in the Marketing and Communications Department.
The University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) is on the east coast of Canada, with close to 900 staff serving around 5500 total full-time students. It’s the only university in the province.
The majority of the department’s work has been focused on attracting and retaining students, and they work closely with the recruitment department.
Recognizing how important the website is for recruitment of new students is really the main goal of the Marketing and Communications department.
The team is made up of around 10 staff (graphic designers, a photographer, a production coordinator, tech support, media producer, content writer, and director).
The provincial government has set up incentives so the majority of students are local, and this is where most marketing efforts are focused. Some students are from the outlying areas of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
A popular draw for US and international students is the Veterinary Medicine programme and graduate programs.
There are 2 people producing content and one director overseeing them.
The marketing and communication department’s focus
“We’re very keen on streamlining the student website funnels, so keeping on top of quality and accuracy is key, which is why we use Silktide”, said Ty.
“We’ve implemented several initiatives, including the main focus of building an intranet, storing all course-related materials there for current students, and changing the focus of the public website to be solely on attracting new students.”
“The key is to reach those people and ensure the content they find is relevant to them. We spent a lot of time over the last year using Silktide to audit the website so we could remove outdated content (especially that which was brought over from the website redesign back in 2018), along with orphaned pages and broken links.”
“We’d also heard from a few people that accessibility wasn’t as good as it could be. So we wanted some guidance to give us the steps to follow where we could work through and improve.”
Over the last 12 months, we’ve made great strides to do that. Our content now helps our audience follow the journeys, experience the content, and understand it.
The accessibility journey
“Something we always had in the back of our mind was that the web accessibility standards exist, and they exist for a reason.”
“There’s nobody at the campus leading the charge on the website accessibility, but there is a very successful and well-used accessibility services department to support students on-site.”
“So, getting the site up to the WCAG standards meant we needed help. The guidelines can be difficult for non-technical people to understand, but bringing Silktide in has helped us. Our technical team liaised with Silktide’s technical support for detailed help with specific problems, and our metrics have just jumped.”
“With the team’s work, we saw a 10-15 point jump across the board in our scores. It’s been an interesting process to figure out how all that worked, and now we’re ready to start working towards the more intermediate or advanced challenges while maintaining our scores.”
The explanatory content in Silktide absolutely helps me do my job better
Web Writer and Content Architect
How Silktide helps
“We use a wide range of Silktide features, notably Policies (which help us perform custom checks) and Annotations (which help us assign tasks to individuals and keep track of the work).”
“The Academy modules are really helpful. The way the checks are explained are really straightforward and easy to follow.”
We can do everything inside Silktide without having to go to other tools, it’s good to have it all in one place.
Web Writer and Content Architect
“We looked at a number of products. We wanted something to help us tune our site, and make our content as engaging and accessible as possible. So then there are no issues with the content and that frees us up to focus on our marketing message instead.”
“It’s super important for us and will get more important. The website is key and we absolutely need to lean on it. It’s our main recruitment tool. Of course, our recruiters and advisors still go out on the road to fairs, and high schools, and use other traditional student recruitment methods, but the website is going to have to do more.”
“We’ll need to create new content, with specific tools and methods to target these students. Having Silktide here and available to us helps us track everything we’ve done, all the enhancements and improvements we’ve made to the site, with that student audience in mind.”
“Being able to show our progress to internal working groups and senior administrators has been really important.”
The problems faced before finding Silktide
“We came from a decentralized model of content creation. Anyone with login credentials could add content to the website.”
“Most of the content being added was not good. It was redundant, full of errors, and the website had no consistent architecture or structure. We had no program pages, and there were far more pages than there are now (over 30,000).”
“The course directory was not written in any way to be enticing, easy to read, or help visitors understand the student experience in each program. So this had to change.”
“We moved to a centralized model. Content and ideas can come from anywhere, but we’ve created a collaborative process to ensure the content meets organizational standards and goals.”
“We work with individuals submitting site content to focus messaging to prospective students, and let them know the intranet is the best place to reach current students.”
“In looking for something to help us understand where the content is, how much there is, why certain errors are showing up (like broken links), we found Silktide.”
“We wanted to move into improving accessibility. Silktide stood out by helping us with accessibility, and also content governance, policies, style guides, and all the things we wanted to have but didn’t have.”
“You could tell immediately from demos that Silktide has a very strong level of expertise in web accessibility.”
“So in making our content better, we wanted to be accessible as well. We may not be mandated to comply with all accessibility standards, but we are way, way ahead for when we do, and I love that.”
Silktide has really helped us understand our content, where we can improve, and how we can better tell our story.
Web Writer and Content Architect
“Some of the checks in Silktide have helped us do the best job we can when talking to our students, like making sure our reading level is considered.”
“We don’t have the time or expertise to do this on our own.”
What UPEI loves about Silktide
“For me, it’s just being able to go in at any time and easily see how much work has been completed, and how much work is outstanding.”
“All of the checks are just so helpful. Being able to go in and assign the work to whomever can address it is so helpful.”
“Immediately understanding where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. We know which issues we can manage ourselves, and which ones we need to send out.”
“The uptime monitor specifically is really helpful, because we don’t control our infrastructure. We use it to show slow performance or other problems, and send these to the IT Systems and Services team so they can identify them.”
“Being able to show them what Silktide is telling us has been instrumental in keeping our site up longer, making sure it’s faster, and the performance is better.”
“For me, just looking at the dashboard each morning and being able to see what needs to be scheduled out is so easy. I really enjoy being able to take care of all the things I need to and know which things I need to assign.”
Ready to get started?
Request a demo