Changes made to the Ashland University website have usually been controversial. The marketing and web design team had that in mind this year when they set to create a new homepage for Ashland.edu.

As it stands now, Ashland.edu redirects to the ‘future undergraduates” tab to accommodate potential students, but faculty and current students have lobbied complaints that the default redirect to the “future undergraduates” page doesn’t cater to their needs.

The new page will allow visitors to choose which area of the site they need to view then directs them there.

Director of Web Services, Terrance Henry, said that the goal of the new webpage is to easily get people where they need to go and that faculty and current students feel the homepage is irrelevant for them.

“We want people to easily be able to connect to the appropriate page,” Henry said. “We want to alleviate the disconnect that faculty and students feel about the current homepage.”

Marketing and Web Services have been working for the past three months to design the new homepage.

“We’ve been working for the past two to three months,” Henry said. “But the idea has been planted for around six to eight months.”

The new director of Marketing, Jan Bond, has been working with Henry and the design team to create the new homepage.

“We are looking to design a homepage that accurately engages students,” Bond said. “A homepage is a gateway to our university for so many different audiences. We have to make sure that it’s easy to navigate and has all the right information about the school.”

Bond hopes that the site will be well received by students and plans to continually evaluate the website and its’ performance.

“We want it to be a good revision,” Bond said. “We need to test it with the audience to review it before it goes live. We have to continuously evaluate it; it’s a living sort of thing.”

Henry said he hopes that if the site continues on schedule it will be active hopefully by the end of October.

The new page will be Ashland.edu and it will offer links to the various areas of the website including staff and faculty, current students or future undergraduates.

Websites are one of the more controversial topics at Ashland and the marketing department hopes that communication will make the new site a great topic, rather than a controversial one.