www.rice.edu

Rice’s New Audience-Driven Homepage

Universities use their websites to provide information to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and others and to market themselves to prospective students. Yet each of these audiences requires very different sorts of information and capabilities. The conundrum Rice faces is how to address the highly individual concerns of many diverse audiences with a single homepage. This fall, the university has taken a new approach to that dilemma with the introduction of an “audience-driven” website, which directs each group to a page custom-designed for it.

“The typical one-size-fits-all model may work for a commercial website, which has one audience—customers,” says Terry Shepard, vice president for public affairs, who conceived the new website and whose division oversees the look and feel of the site’s top tiers. “Universities have so many components and purposes—teaching, research, administration, recruiting, communicating with alumni and donors—that no one page can serve all those well.”

First-time visitors to www.rice.edu are asked to click on a menu to identify themselves as a: General Online Visitor; Prospective Student (Undergraduate, Graduate, or Business), Current Student (Undergraduate, Graduate, or Business), Faculty Member/Researcher, Staff Member, Rice Alum, Continuing Studies Student, Journalist, or Donor/Prospective Donor. That automatically opens a “gateway”—a Rice homepage whose design and content is aimed specifically at that group’s interests.