From the Nominator

"In late February 2022, NC State University Communications and Marketing relaunched the university’s enterprise website ncsu.edu. The website was built by an in-house team of content specialists, developers and designers using our bespoke NC State Web Platform. Our goals were to create a more concise and focused website that more closely aligned with the university’s strategic plan; refocus our core content for our primary audience of prospective students; draw a brighter line between “marketing” pages (for external users) and “utility” pages (for internal users); and empower content creators to shape the long-term governance and curation of the site.  

In the 11 months since the site launched, we’ve seen a sitewide 11.6 percent increase in new users, a 14.21 percent improvement in bounce rate and a 7.34 percent increase in average time on page compared to the previous year. While overall pageviews decreased, we attribute this to a steep decline in COVID-related traffic and a deliberate streamlining of the site’s overall page count. Traffic to the homepage and key admissions pages markedly increased, while traffic to our search pages dropped, suggesting users were better able to navigate to relevant content. We also saw a 5.81 percent increase in “admissions clicks” (any event where a user chooses to navigate from ncsu.edu to our Undergraduate Admissions website, admissions.ncsu.edu)."

From the Judges

Overall, the site is clean, modern and easy to navigate. Great consistent and cohesive design and IA. Good use of space and great use of brand identity. Great use of quantitative data to illustrate project goals and success. Wonderful photography and videos. We were impressed that this was put together in such a short amount of time.