Portfolio: The New School

“Milano trains leaders for the nonprofit, public, and private sectors with a measurable difference…Milano students work on local and global issues affecting organizations and urban communities, from New York City to around the world.”

Update: New School Site Goes from Worst to First

Since May 25th, 2006, when our re-boot of the New School's Milano site went live, traffic has increased at a higher rate—averaging a 57% increase per month and over 500% in the aggregate—than any other college’s site on the newschool.edu domain.

Any admissions director will tell you if they can increase enrollment by 3%, they're due a healthy raise in pay; Milano's enrollment, since the site went live, is up 45%. 'Nuff said.

Learn How To Change The World

Visit Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy

Services Used:

Web Design, Site Management and Search Engine Optimization

The Problem: Site Largely Ignored for Years

The Milano website had been largely ignored for years, devolving into an incoherent mess, with no overarching strategy and an ambiguous navigational structure.

Something had to be done and STAT!

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The Solution: NextDesign

NextDesign created an interim site for Milano with two goals:

Increase enrollment
Enhance academic reputation

The New School was about to embark on an ambitious web project. The plan was to unify the websites of the component schools of the university by standardizing several key elements on every web page—headers, footers and menu structures.

This idea would allow each school its individual identity while maintaining stylistic ties to the larger university’s site. As far as we know, this has never been done before with any university site.

Working within Established Parameters

Working within these stylistic parameters—using ASP to drive an XML menu structure —NextDesign created a site reflecting the dynamic nature of Milano, highlighting the many events and news items generated by the students, faculty and staff.

The XML menu’s navigational structure follows two tracks:

Organizationally-based:
Admissions, academics, about, career services, news & events;
Stakeholder-based:
Prospective students, current students, alumni, faculty & staff;

Logical associations established between these two nav forms create an intuitive flow for the site’s users; faculty bio pages link to courses they teach, where students may also find syllabi from other professors offering that course.

Quick Results

Links to the Admissions department’s monthly Open House events appear on a majority of the pages within the site, offering easy road map for prospective students looking to know more about Milano and the graduate programs it offers.

Within weeks of going live, reservations for these Open House events jumped over 300%, with many of the participants crediting the new web site for their decision to attend this event.

After six months, the main page's Google ranking jumped two points, from 5 to 7 out of a possible 10; searching for the site by primary keywords gave consistent results in the first five results.

Before the redesign, searching Google for the word "Milano" alone, the school did not appear until the tenth or fifteen page of search results. Within six months, the site came in on the first page of search results at number five, behind the the city of Milan (Milano in Italian) and Alyssa Milano, but ahead of Pepperedge Farms’ Milano cookies.