Northland Community and Technical College is pleased to announce the launch of its newly redesigned website, available at www.northlandcollege.edu.

The new Northland College website will play a pivotal role in future marketing and recruiting efforts of the College. It is intended to communicate a brand personality that is open, friendly, flexible, student-centered, energetic, engaged, and real-world focused.

The web is a continuous state of evolution. Over the past couple years Northland's website has undergone several minor facelifts. Webmaster Chad Sperling has been working on the redesign for several months.”I thought it was time for a more substantial change. A change that better presented our content to our steadily growing number of nearly 200,000 monthly visitors," said Sperling. “I had three key goals in mind with the redesign; transform the home page focus from an IT tool for current students into more of a marketing tool for prospective students; to improve the user experience for everyone; and make the site easier to navigate. Right now it's mainly just the home page with the new design. The rest of the site will get redesigned on a site-by-site basis. A consistent, unified approach to visual design will be applied to all levels of the site, giving it a contemporary look and feel,” Sperling said.

“The new Northland College website is the result of a highly disciplined, yet collegial effort,” states Stacey Hron, director of technology and marketing. “From the beginning, Northland staff, faculty, and students have worked hand-in-hand with our webmaster to create this extraordinary communication tool.”

During the redesign process, Sperling incorporated the use of a blog to receive feedback from employees, students and the general public. Users were able to test out beta sites and give feedback. Sperling then incorporated the user feedback within the redesign.

Notable new features users will discover include a faster, more robust search, the utilization of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube; and video is now more prominent and will be available throughout the entire site.