DOWAGIAC — Southwestern Michigan College’s website, swmich.edu, will be undergoing a redesign with a predicted completion date of next summer, before the college’s recruiting cycle.

At a recent board of trustees meeting, Vice President of Marketing and Enrollment Management Michael O’Brien announced the college’s progress on its website redesign. The redesign’s goal is to make the website a more attractive enrollment resource, guarantee it is Americans with Disabilities Act compliant and add Amazon Web Services.

Each year, the college gathers requests across departments and divisions for non-operating expenses. Once a list is defined, it goes into a plan approved by the board of trustees in the 2020 fiscal budget. One of these typically “big-ticket items,” which President Dr. David Mathews said are usually nonrecurring, is the college’s redesign of its website. The website’s last design update was in 2014.

“In the IT world, a couple of years is an eternity, right?” said Mathews about the college’s reasoning for a redesign. “We desperately need to do it.”

The website redesign has been a hand in glove project between the college’s marketing department and the internet technology program. The college’s Chief Information Officer Mckechney Valeris, who previously worked for 16 years at Ivy Tech, has been working on the website redesign as well.

Displaying an image of the current site on a screen, O’Brien said the website is the college’s public storefront.

“You may have noticed that we are in a somewhat remote location relative to the population base, so it is important that people can find out about the college, not only from our own community, but outside the community,” he said.

With taxpayers being one of SMC’s constituents, the website also serves as a portal to taxpayer information including budgets, agendas, meetings and a place for information about events happening on campus.

To give a scope of the traffic SMC’s current site gets, O’Brien said the website gets about 36,000 web sessions per month, which Google Analytics describes as a group of interactions a single visitor to the site takes within a given time frame.

SMC’s current website is built on a Drupal Seven content management system. Drupal announced it will no longer be doing security updates for that system after 2021. O’Brien said if the college updated to Drupal Eight, a complete redesign would be needed regardless, although with Drupal architecture, IT has to update security patches and is unable to make Drupal completely ADA compliant.

Another reasoning for a website redesign is the outlook of a fresh start.

“As we’ve added content and programs have been added and other navigation has changed, it makes sense sometimes to look at it fresh and reorganize the information,” O’Brien said.

A website redesign also is a competitive enrollment tool as the college competes with other universities and community colleges.

The marketing and IT team started looking last December at issues with open source platforms.

In April, the team sent a request for proposal to 13 agencies across the country, including two in Michigan. The team received 10 proposals, worked through them and ultimately selected Terminalfour to do the entire website’s package. Terminalfour is based out of Boston with 68 employees and is a cloud-host content management system, meaning it will be offsite.

To align with the college’s core value of 21st Century services, O’Brien said the website redesign is necessary to support what the college needs.

The capital purchase of $155,000 for the initial website redesign is already allocated in the 2020 fiscal budget, but the board of trustees will have to accommodate future fiscal budgets for a reoccurring and larger operating cost of $27,000.

The college plans to kick off the redesign within the next few weeks with an ultimate deadline of completion well before Aug. 1.