IT Updates the Academy’s Official Website

By  SAM ALTMAN

The website is the first thing that prospective students in middle and high school discover when they are looking for information about the Academy. In many ways, our website is the face of our school, and so it’s vitally important that we constantly keep it up to date. Recently, the Communications Department made several large changes to the way Exeter presents itself and stores its online resources. Associate Director of Communications and Digital Marketing Patrick Garrity was a major force in the website’s development and provided a great deal of insight into the inner-workings of the new site.

Garrity began by explaining what motivated the changes on the website. “It was a combination of technical necessity and the need to refresh content and design. Firstly, the supporting platform we were on was no longer going to be supported by Acquia, the web provider. So, we knew we had to make a change regardless. At that point, we thought that if we were going to do all this work, we might as well make the eight-year old site cleaner and more efficient in terms of storage. There was just a lot to navigate. The user would come to the site and try to find something, and it was like going through a corn maze.”

“The whole communications department was involved with gathering the content, whether it be videos, photos, or copying writing for fifteen months now. For the most part, it was Emma Ward and I who did the website building, but overall, it was a team effort. We also worked with a design firm and Common Media to help us create the final product,” Garrity said.

One of the major alterations to the website was a large influx of new graphics and video testimonials, one of which (an image of crew on the Squamscott) now immediately greets you when you open the home page. “Our partners really wanted us to lean into our imagery,” Garrity continued. “And, because we have such an amazing catalog of photos and videos, we decided that what prospective students really want to see on the site is themselves. The question is, can they picture themselves on the website? Ultimately this site is for prospective students, and as much as words are important, it’s more engaging if a 13-year old can really picture themselves there on campus.”

To that end, the website was fitted with many other new features meant to make the site more interactive.“We tried to make the site not overly sophisticated. It’s not meant to be somewhere where you do transactions—it’s an informational site, and so it’s more about storytelling. That’s why we added a few of those bells and whistles like the scrolling tickers or those photos that start playing videos when you hover over them,” said Garrity.

Another notable new feature can be found under  the “Visit Exeter” tab on the website: a virtual tour consisting of a series of 360° is now visible for students to move through. It includes an audio narration and views everywhere from the football fields to in front of the Academy building to the bandstand at the center of town.

“That feature has actually been there for a while, it just wasn’t easily accessible,” Garrity explained. “A couple of years ago, two tour guides narrated it for us and it’s great because you can get a good sense of campus even if you can’t come.”

In the process of reorganizing the website, some services were moved from their typical locations. “If you’re looking for your classes or schedule or anything like that, those are now all on MyExeter, and that is a necessary division,” Garrity noted. “Since the site is primarily for prospective students, it’s not information that they really need, and also it’s a matter of security for our community. We don’t want people to be able to access that information or hours of religious service, for example, that used to be online.”

The team also worked with different departments around campus to create a different site that branches off of the main exeter.edu site so as to streamline access to their respective content. One example is with the athletics department, as Garrity explained, “Athletics used to be on our old platform. But they asked to use an external tool called SIDEARM sports because it was already fitted to include things like rosters and schedules. Previously, it was onerous to deal with that stuff but Exeter has been one of the first high schools to contract with them and now other schools are beginning to as well.”

Garrity continued, “A lot of visitors to athletics are just moms and dads who want to know what time and where the game is and where they can watch it online. So, we still have an easy link to the athletics portal on the main site so they can still find it easily. Eventually, many might just bookmark the athletics page.”

With all of these changes, there are still some issues that the department is working on.“The beauty of the site is that it’s iterative,” Garrity reflected. “We launched it only a week ago and we’re still changing it every day to ensure it’s fresh and accurate. So it’s a constant process, but getting to this point was quite a triumph for us. We weren’t sure we were ever going to see it. One thing we’re working on is the search bar—we need to make sure that, for example, when someone searches up dorm life, a page on dorm life needs to come up. Many people prefer to use the search rather than the menu anyway, because we’re so used to using Google.”

Additionally, recently, some of the pages on the new website have been giving error messages. Garrity explained why this might be. “The redirects that we created over the last eight years now have to be picked up and put on this site. So, there will definitely be some 404 errors—the website is asking, ‘Wait, where is that?’ We’re monitoring those and trying to fix them.”

Among the student body, some had reservations about the changes made. “I liked the old website better because it had a more natural look to it. The new one looks like it is trying too hard to be sleek and model. I’m not a huge fan of the large picture of people rowing because I don’t think it symbolizes our school well,” upper Ezra Segal commented.

Regarding any changes in the future, Garrity expressed caution at doing anything too quickly. “We talked to one of our vendors recently and, with as many ideas as we have, their recommendation is to let it sit for at least a couple months to get some feedback on it. If we change things immediately, then we’re just doing knee-jerk reactions to somebody saying something. Instead, we want to make thoughtful and strategic decisions to make the experience better for everyone.”

“We’re telling our story and getting our message out,” Garrity concluded. “Our website is the ‘special sauce’ to do that. And we didn’t change the sauce but the vehicle on which we were conveying. It had gotten eight years old and it was time to move on from it to something with improved abilities.”