CSU’s e-tour makes wise use of Internet

‘Virtual visit’ garners tie for 1st place

FORT COLLINS – Trent Welling never walked the campus of Colorado State University before he moved into a dorm there this fall.

He never pressed his face into the stiff prairie wind or strolled through the tunnel of cottonwoods that anchor the school’s oval lawn. The 18-year-old freshman had never even been to Fort Collins or even to Colorado.

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But in his mind he had.

Welling was among the first group of prospective students to walk through the university’s virtual gates, admiring Horsetooth Rock and watching the seasons change on the oval from his computer in West Hartford, Conn.

The portal is visit.colostate.edu, a highly targeted, interactive Web site designed to meet the modern needs of CSU’s prospective students. A new addition to the ever-growing colostate.edu domain this year, the site is already raising eyebrows, earning a tie for first place in The Northern Colorado Business Report’s “Best of the Web” competition.

“I checked out all the local stuff and looked into intramural soccer because I play,” Welling said. “It was really cool.”

“Cool” is exactly what Webmaster Chris Weller was going for. Smattered with photographs, exterior links and video, the site is designed to bring a full spectrum of CSU experiences – not simply academics – home to a narrow teenage demographic.

“We thought there might be a gap between the standard site and what students are looking for,” Weller said. “Visit shows a little about academics but a lot about Colorado and interesting things about CSU.”

The university’s front page is hedged to accommodate the diverse needs and technical capabilities of everyone from student researchers to alumni, Weller said, circumscribing its technological breadth.

“If we can’t create a Web page that is customized to the users we will not have accomplished what we need to,´ said Tom Milligan, a member of the Web team. “It’s just too big of a place. If we aren’t able to narrow a site down to an interest level, we are missing people.”

The site sprung out of a new marketing plan, through which the university is trying to corral prospective students by showing them where CSU is, not just what it is. To accomplish that, the site highlights local skiing, hiking and climbing sights, capitalizing on an assumption that most out-of-state students who come to Colorado are “into outdoor stuff,” Milligan said.

The visit site goes beyond graphics, though; it also ties each page to textual information and a Web of activity-related links to sites in and out of the university.

While hit totals have been encouraging, the site’s matriculating affect on prospective students is difficult to tally, Milligan said.

“We really think that a Web page is not a replacement for marketing,” he said. “It’s a good supplement, though. It helps us to build a relationship between the students and the university.”

Moving to personalize that relationship, CSU took a technological leap of faith with the visit site, Milligan said. Banking on the tech skills of its target audience, the graphic-intensive design ran the risk of alienating some less savvy visitors. But to woo neophytes, the university includes a low-tech default option that will work with almost every browser, Milligan said. So far the university has registered only “a handful” of complaints.

High tech and personal is the wave of the future at CSU, like it or not. Visit is the first in a series of increasingly interactive and adaptive Web sites that the university has planned, Weller said. Another student site dubbed goplaces.colostate.edu is slated for upload next year. And soon students will be able to access e-mail, class information, registration and personalized news on their own adaptive site at my.colostate.edu.

“We’re getting into the broadband age,” Weller said. “Soon everything will be based more on user preferences. We have to give the user what they want and make sure when they get it they’re also getting what we want them to have.”