- Take a look at St. Clair Colleges website. In relation to visuals, what would you propose to St. Clair College to improve/enhance this new website to effectively market to potential incoming local domestic students. Please provide three (3) recommendations and justify your answer with detailed reasoning. (9 Marks)
The first thing i would propose to St Clair to improve/enhance their website to effectively market to potential incoming local domestic students would be to balance out the copy on each page with visuals so that it is not so copy heavy. If I could only choose one page to apply this change to, I would choose the home page because it is the first page that potential incoming local domestic students will see when they visit St. Clair College’s website. I recommend this change first of all, because the ratio of text to visuals (images, videos) is very off balance which makes users be faced with an overload of text and very few images to give their attention to. The home page would benefit from a video pano showcasing the top things that incoming local domestic students care about (location, programs, college life). This would be extremely effective because as we discussed in class, “visuals get 94% more views than text-based information” (Briscoe, W9 – B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 3). Because we know we only have 2.8-8 seconds to capture the attention of users visiting our website, we have to hook them fast with enticing, authentic and attractive visuals, and it will be beneficial to St Clair College because “Viewers spend 100% more time on pages with visual content” and “Photos, pictures, and videos get over 100% more engagement” (Briscoe, W9 – B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, slides 6, 9). Knowing that people only read 28% of the words on a web page, St Clair College’s new and improves website should focus on transmitting messages through visuals that will grab the attention of potential incoming local students and resonate with them while creating a more enjoyable experience for them using videos and photos that is more impactful.
The next thing I would propose to St Clair to improve/enhance their website is to replace images that serve no purpose beyond being purely decorative, such as the Pano image for the ‘programs’ page. Here is the Pano for the programs page so that you can better understand what I mean:
The Pano image for one of the most important pages on St Clair Colleges website for potential incoming local and domestic students, is what appears to be a carpet. This is an example of images that are decorative and lack imagination, it is just a carpet with the St Clair College griffin on it. As we discussed in class, using images that are used for purely decorative purposes should be avoided because “When off-topic graphics appear on the screen, learners will subconsciously try to figure out the message and reason for the image” (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 13). St Clair should replace images like these that serve no purpose and provide no value to images/videos that:
- Represent actual objects, people, or places.
- Simplify complex or abstract ideas.
- Bridge already learned materials with the unfamiliar.
A better alternative for this picture specifically would be a Pano video showcasing the top sought after programs with real students on campus, demonstrating the most interesting and anticipated moments of their college experience. This would be beneficial because it would resonate emotionally with potential incoming students by showing them things they care about. As we discussed in class, visuals cause a faster and stronger reaction than words and are stored in the same place where emotions are processed (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 14). This shows a strong link between memory and visuals, which is why we should take advantage of this and use visuals that will evoke a strong emotional response and stick in the brains of potential incoming students, which they will recall later. I don’t believe that the image of the carpet made a strong impression on potential local students, and I doubt they will recall even seeing it because it is purely decorative. An impactful video Pano showing college life, programs, sports and unique experience (competitions, field trips) would be extremely beneficial as “90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual” (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 8), which would allow the information to be easily processed and remembered in the brain. This would also lead to higher engagement metrics for St Clair College as “content with visuals/videos attracts 3X more inbound links” (Briscoe, W9 – B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 14).
The third thing I would propose to St Clair to improve/enhance their website is to use infographics to relay important information instead of paragraphs of text that most often aren’t even written in plain language, using the F pattern or inverse pyramid. An example of this on the St Clair College website is I would propose to St Clair to improve/enhance their website is the “future students page”: https://www.stclaircollege.ca/future-students .
Besides replacing the Pano with a video Pano that would resonate better with potential incoming domestic students as I mentioned in the previous suggestion, I would recommend that they use an infographic to relay the most important information on this page to incoming students in a way that they will actually read and process the information. Infographics are beneficial as they increase web traffic by an average of 12% (Briscoe, W9 – B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 5). The paragraph after “Why St Clair College” could be reduced to a couple points with pictures and graphics to go with them. I would reduce this section to these points:
- Top Tier Education (Hands on Learning, State of the Art Labs and Facilities)
- 120 + Programs
- Campus Life and Support
- Proven Graduate Success
Along with each point would be a relevant and engaging visual, allowing for better comprehension and retention as “Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text” (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 8). Because of the fact that we can get the sense of a visual scene in less than 1/10 of a second (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 8), using an infographic here would allow for much faster processing and comprehension of St Clair Colleges benefits and what makes them stand apart. This is key information for potential incoming domestic students to know and understand, so we want to make it as easy and appealing as possible for them, because they most likely won’t be reading more than 27% of the text anyway.
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