Jadu, a Sanskrit word commonly used in Hindi: to affect change by magic, to appear by magic and to control by the use of magic.

Jadu is also the name of the new content management system (CMS) that Wayne State College is going to use to revamp the WSC website.

“When you look at what a content management system does—when you look at how it works—it really does for a lot of people look like magic, because they are so used to the idea that actually manipulating data, images and all those other things on a website is a very hard, complicated process,” Jay Collier, Director of College Relations, said.

The college has been putting a lot of time and effort into making the CMS efficient. It did surveys, focus groups and compiled data in hopes of building the best possible WSC website with the Jadu CMS.
The college will work with Jadu filling out questionnaires and listing adjectives to describe what it wants the website to look like.

“The idea going forward is that our website will be a much more dynamic multi-medium sort of website,” Collier said. “It will incorporate not just text but pictures, video and all of those things we can update on a moment’s notice and add to enhance the experience.”

The current system used on the WSC web pages has to be updated using Dreamweaver. The process of updating and maintaining the pages using Dreamweaver takes some knowledge and expertise, according to Collier.

The new Jadu CMS will be easier to update and maintain. It will look better and be more user-friendly.

“The people that are going to be putting things into the content management system are individual faculty and individual students. It will take a little bit of training, but it is much less technical than what we have been using until now, Dreamweaver,” Michael Marek, professor of mass communication, said. “It will take a little bit of training for faculty and students, but it will be quite easy to use.”

The four main schools and their departments will decide who their designated member is who will upload content to the website.

Content creation can be done by anyone and they can pass on the content to their department’s designated content uploaded. All those who are going to be using the CMS will be trained so they fully understand how to use it, according to Collier.

The content management system will better connect with the users of the website. The college wants the website to drive users, prospective students to apply and enroll and alumni to stay connected or donate.

CMS will not only make the website more appealing, but it also improves the business side. Filling out scholarship applications, financial aid and paying bills to the college will be revamped. It is going to be a user-friendly website.

It will keep alumni connected with what is currently going on at WSC, and may even make alumni want to donate to their alma mater.

“If you can use Facebook, if you can use any kind of social media like that, you’ll be able to use our new content management system,” Collier said. “It is that easy to use.”

The new system will not be up and running right away, but it will be launched in phases. The first phase will be done by next fall, and the next and final phase will hopefully be done around spring of next year, according to Collier.

“At the end of the day if this website is not driving an increase in applications, if it isn’t driving an increase in enrollment, if it isn’t making things easier for people here on campus and if it isn’t winning awards for the awesomeness of its design, we are wasting our time.”

But WSC isn’t wasting its time.

“We don’t want to have a good website. We want to have the best website. We want to blow the doors off of anything that UNL has, Kearney, UNO and any of those schools,” Collier said. “We think the company we have contracted with Jadu and the people we have in place here give us the tools to do so.”