LACD Website Redesign! We need your help!

If you have a question regarding a company, where’s the first place you look? If you are a functioning human under the age of 80, you would probably use a Google search to pull up the company’s website. For the whippersnappers in my generation, it’s second nature. Basically, if a company/professional/organization wants to survive out in the cold, capitalist world, a website is beyond essential. So if everyone needs a website, that means they must be pretty easy to make, right?

Wrong. While web programs have made it pretty easy to create a site, creating a site that is informative, well designed and up to date is quite difficult. For my 500 level capstone Professional Writing course, our class made it a mission to redesign the department website. We spent an entire semester working on this project and barely scratched the surface. Since I am a writer, the first thing I wanted to work on was the actual content creation. Little did I know that this is one of the last steps in the website creation process. I think we were all pretty shocked at how much work really does go in to creating a site, specifically the research and planning stages.

Bad websites are very easy to make. Common mistakes such as poor navigation, outdated information and misunderstanding the needs of the audience can kill the credibility of a website. If a user comes to a site seeking answers, and leaves frustrated the site has damaged the company’s professional brand and alienated the audience: two things that a business cannot afford to do.

Since Career Week has come to a close, Liberal Arts Career Development is currently working on redesigning our website. We want to create an updated, new site that focuses on serving students. But we can’t do it alone. We need your help! After Spring Break, we will be emailing out a survey and conducting a focus group to get feedback from our most valued audience membes, meaning you, Purdue undergraduate students. Please take the time to fill out the survey or contact us about participating in a focus group. It would be a great opportunity for you to experience professionally, and we could greatly improve our site based on your feedback. Be watching your inbox for more information.