The Division of Marketing and Strategic Communications celebrated the launch of the new acu.edu website on Monday. The project’s team started working in the summer of 2020, managing about 2,200 pages for the new site.

In seven months, hundreds of pages were rewritten to better serve their intended audience. Riley Wills, the director of web strategy in the DMSC, served as a leader for creating an accessible and reliable space for campus partners to manage the content they share. 

“I am most excited about conveying the university’s story through our students, staff, faculty and alums on the new website,” Wills said. “I encourage people to check out the new appearance and dive into the stories found throughout the website.”

The university began discussing a potential new website in January of 2020, as they recognized multiple difficulties for audiences to find the information they were looking for. This operation was led by senior vice president Linda Bonnin after she had trouble navigating the site when considering a move to ACU. 

“When I came to ACU last spring, I had a clear vision for what our website should look like and how it should function,” Bonnin said. “We called the project ‘acu.edu reimagined’ because we weren’t just going to slap lipstick on a pig; we blew up the site and reimagined it from the ground up.”

On the site’s first live day, Technology Support said they received no complaints about confusion on how the site functions. There have been many positive reactions from the community about the layout and content of the website.

“Our website is the front door – our first impression – to prospective students, donors, faculty and research organizations,” said Natalie Ledford, DMSC chief digital officer. “We will continue to optimize and improve the content so that ACU maintains relevance and presence in the digital space.”

The next step for this team is to train campus partners on how to write and edit content for the site. The team hopes to continuously improve the acu.edu experience.