Students and staff members can expect to see upcoming changes to the Wayne State College website next August.  

Staff members from Public Relations and digitial arts on campus have been actively working on an updated Wayne State website for multiple years. “In terms of design, this is the first redesign of the site since we launched with Jadu back in 2016, I think,” Jay Collier, head of public relations on campus, said.  

Jeff Piper is a digital design artist for Wayne State College who works on developing the design and functionality of the website.  

“My job is to work with our programmer here in our office to develop widgets and kind of the overall look and functionality of the website,” Piper said. “Then we work with our marketing team in college relations to give those kinds of widgets and what not to them so they can plug their content in and make things look nice and function properly.” 

Over the span of five years, Piper has been working on the new website. It has been a long process due to issues with the programmer company Jadu.  

“There has been some significant delays associated with some issues with the software from Jadu,” Collier said. “Plus, we have our normal day job that we have to do, so we are doing this project on top of the work we already do.” 

Jadu is based in the United Kingdom, and the distance can cause a lack of updates preventing any further work on the website, delaying the project.  

“They run our content management system, which is behind the scenes of how our website functions and how we deploy permission to other people to do publishing for us,” Piper said. “We give other people on campus the opportunity to do some of their own updates. So that is kind of how it runs.” 

College relations spent time asking those on campus for input on what to include on the new Wayne State website. The various changes focused on encouraging enrollment.  

“The biggest thing that the website serves us for is the perspective students,” Collier said. “We use it as a marketing vehicle, just so that perspective students can get a sense of course work. Especially programs and the academic programs. Perspective students are looking if we have their program. We spend a lot of time working on those program pages.”  

Although the site will look different, it will operate the same. Students and facility members will have no challenge running the site and locating apps such as Canvas, Outlook and WSC Online.  

“We are not starting from scratch and dumping everything that is good and works on our existing website,” Piper said. “We are just trying to improve apon it. The search mechanism for our programs are going to be improved. Overall just give it a fresh look. Improve some of the features that we already have, making them better, and making them easier to update for our web team.” 

Despite the long process and challenges, Collier said the website will hopefully be done in May to allow for a trial period this summer.