The Office of Web & Digital Strategy has achieved several key initiatives across the uis.edu website and mobile app, enhancing the overall experience for both visitors and content editors. These improvements have strengthened accessibility, usability, transparency, and the findability of information. View our FY25 website stats for details on site performance.

UPCEA Online Assessment

UPCEA completed online assessments of 51 institutions and the uis.edu received high ranks in the following:

• Voted #1 for:
  • Visual Design and Appeal
  • Accessibility
  • # of social media platforms
• Voted #3 for key factor transparency
  Key factors examine how clear, detailed, and easily found program offerings, tuition costs, fees, program length, and delivery.

Areas that were identified that require our attention and need improvement include site speed/performance, crawlability, and internal links.

Featured Projects FY25

Confirmed Student Checklist

In collaboration with Enrollment Management, the Office of Web & Digital Strategy redesigned the Confirmed Student Checklist page, to better outline the necessary steps for students after acceptance. The page features an interactive checklist with call-to-actions for each step. Students can check off steps as they complete them, or print and do so in paper form. There are tabs to show the checklist by student type.

Value of UIS

The “Value of UIS” page presents UIS’s value proposition at a glance—rankings, student outcomes, financial aid, and campus life—using clear stats (e.g., $25M in aid, 83% employed after graduation, 70+ clubs), a short video, and prominent “Apply”/“Request Info” calls to action. It’s valuable because it builds credibility and ROI confidence for prospective students and families while efficiently driving inquiries and applications. Since its launch in May 2025, the page received over 6K views in only 3 months!

Orbit Updates

General updates were made to improve the overall look and feel for the Orbit site as well as the following.

Newsletter and Subscription Capability for Internal News

The web team created a custom module that adds the capability to subscribe and unsubscribe to unit news for UIS employees and updated the Orbit site to feature department newsletters to streamline internal communications. We also added dynamic links to help the user navigate to a list of unit newsletters when viewing an article flagged as a newsletter.

Custom Gutenberg Blocks

The web team developed a module that adds custom blocks for cards with images, cards with image and description, and basic cards with only text. This allows the website editors to add different cards to webpages, no coding required!

Basic Cards

Image Cards

Image Cards with Description

Department & Term Content Blocks

You can now put news, event, directory, and all sorts of feeds anywhere you want in your content! To learn how to insert them into content, please see our How to Use Department & Term Content Blocks resource.

Types of department specific content that can be added:

• Directory list for faculty and/or staff
• Featured profiles for alumni, students, and faculty
• Events
• News
• Programs of Study
• Research Projects
• Resources
• FAQs
• Policies

Compliance & Policy Notifications

A custom module was developed to send notifications to users for pages flagged for compliance to update at a specified date. For policies, notifications are sent if the last reviewed date is past 3 years, advising employees to update their policies. This effort was designed to help ensure the site stays compliant as well as up-to-date for the site's important content and resources. Find our more on How to Create a Policy.

Accessibility Updates

The web team has continued scanning the site and making updates to the site themes and structure to ensure compliance from a development perspective, as well as emailing units on any identified compliance issues. We installed a contributed module that outlines accessibility issues for editors, allowing them to see identified accessibility issues in real-time.

Additionally, our office has been scanning the site using the software available, and sending out reports to units on content related accessibility issues that need resolved. Other efforts include:

• Working with the Office of Digital Accessibility on policies and workflows to ensure we are supporting units and providing the necessary resources for compliance.
• Curating lists of outside vendor sites that are listed across the web.
• Updating file upload options to limit to PDFs only since PDFs can be scanned for accessibility.
• Development related updates to ensure site templates and themes are accessible.
• Additional training with quizzes were implemented to ensure site editors are educated on compliance requirements.

Virtual Tours

The web team created 360 walkthrough tours for Residence Life Housing Options and Nursing department on their About page.

Translated Microsites

The Discover UIS page was created, as well as other top landing pages related to admissions and applying to UIS, were translated to Spanish and Mandarin. We also created a 360 video with a student walkthrough of housing. This effort was made in conjunction with updating the YouVisit virtual tour to offer the tour in those languages.

Website Stats

Find information on site performance, top performing pages, top academic pages, search results, and more!