Website Redesign: Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Helping visitors find their way to the #-1 ranked school of public affairs in the nation.

In 2019, Syracuse University's Maxwell School undertook a full scale assessment, evaluation and rethinking of its website, including design, content, architecture and CMS infrastructure. Under my leadership, the school's communications team partnered with the information technology team to execute a bottom-to-top redesign.

The new Maxwell School website launched in late February of 2022. In the year following the redesign, traffic to "request information" forms increased 200% across all programs while traffic to research pages increased 97%.

From start to finish, the project demanded an integrated approach to address the needs of diverse audiences and constituencies, including internal stakeholders, prospective undergraduate and graduate students, academic peers and other researchers, policymakers, alumni, donors, and the press. Publishing and maintenance also needed to thrive within a complex, highly-matrixed academic environment marked by distributed leadership, often with competing priorities and deadlines.

To achieve this, we designed a plan for two websites: one to help external audiences find their way to the Maxwell School and the other to support internal communications and information for faculty, students, and staff.

Prospective students, policymakers, researchers and the media are the priority audience on maxwell.syr.edu, and they are greeted with navigation and content designed to help them easily discover information that meets their needs. The school's homepage, research and news pages eschew historic department silos and are organized by topics, issues and subject areas of interest to visitors.

A storyteller's "show, don't tell" approach guides every content decision, including how to demonstrate the school's commitments to improving the public good; to fostering inclusion and belonging; and to conducting policy-relevant disciplinary, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and teaching, while avoiding the use of academic jargon on high level introductory pages.

Through a national RFP process, the team selected higher education marketing firm Paskill, Stapleton & Lord (PS&L) as our design partner who helped to develop the overall concept and developed templates for 10 high-value pages, in keeping with university brand standards and the school's value propositions. From this creative framework, the communications and ICT team partnered with school leadership to translate, develop, produce and publish fresh content for 14 centers and institutes, 11 academic programs and a dozen administrative units.

Every section of every webpage includes audience calls to action (CTAs) designed to drive visitors deeper down the funnel and closer to engaging with the Maxwell School.

Do you need help planning, organizing and executing a large scale communications project with many integrated components and stakeholder interests? Ask me about project management engagements.

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