Alliant has a New Website!

San Francisco - July 28, 2005 - Overnight, a new website was born. You will find our new website at the Internet address where our old one used to live: http://www.alliant.edu/.

This new website is designed with several clear objectives in mind:

To increase our enrollment - nearly 90% of our new students come to us through the web. (Our website needs to be an effective marketing vehicle for the University)
To signal to prospective students, alumni, donors and other institutions - as well as to our own faculty and staff – that Alliant is truly going through a renaissance that is reflected educationally, organizationally and in our collective esprit d’ corps
To enable us all to find important information

Prior to undertaking this project, Dr. Eric Gravenberg's Admissions and Marketing staff did a great deal of research about how our competitors at other universities used their websites and how new technologies could be used to enhance the yield of the “enrollment funnel.” By increasing the yield, we improve the efficiency of every marketing dollar we spend, and in every medium. (Because when a student hears a radio ad or reads about us, he or she goes to the website.) Based on case studies of other universities, we think we should be able to ALMOST DOUBLE our yield.

Help! I Can’t Find…

If you can’t find something, don’t panic – the old website still exists. It has been renamed “www2.alliant.edu” (and often adding the 2 to a bad link will make a page appear). You can still get into the Alliant Intranet – and all the old pages – by clicking “Current Students, Faculty and Staff” and using the links below it. The “student portal” link will take you to the Registrar’s page, which contains a full list of quick links. In time, all this – all information used by current faculty, staff and students but not of interest to those who are not yet part of the University - will move into the portal, which will be entered from these links.

Thanks are in Order!

A new website is a gargantuan undertaking, and the work of many hands. So some thanks are in order: To Michelle Fischthal, for working with our ad agency, Stein Communications, to revise our whole admissions section. To Ola Adigun, for programming above and beyond the call of duty. To Julie Bertuccelli, for coordinating budgets and timelines and countless meetings. To Nicolette Toussaint, for managing the project and our contractors, as well as writing and designing big chunks of the website.

To all of the Webspinners, who developed a content outline that makes this website much easier to navigate than its predecessor: Andrea Henne, Craig Brewer, Hernan Bucheli, Jerold Miller, Jonathan Troper, Michael Fuiks, Mike Pittenger, Ned Doherty, Stephanie Byers-Bell, Nicolette Toussaint, Nancy Slanger, Paul Welch, Ola Adigun and GSOE student Kim Butler.

To the many Alliant folks who contributed photographs: Jason Platt, George Zlatanov, Nancy Piotrowski, Nicolette Toussaint, Ava Chan-Crowder, Amica Hong, Jay Finkelman and Jean Chin. (If you hold your cursor over a photograph, an “alt” caption will show up and tell you if the photo has been taken by a member of our community.)

To the students who volunteered to be models for the University. Many of their photos grace the new website, but to ensure their privacy, their names don’t appear on the website. So I want to thank them here: Danielle Schlosser, Gina Poelke, Annie Gutierrez, Kimberly Ringwood, Chris St. Germain, Jacy Leonardo, Angela Almeida, Robert Mejia, Christi Burnett, Caroline Cashman, Loren King, Carmen C. Velazquez, Amy Gregg, Kristy Viera, Alicia Price, Ben Lamorte, Richie Wong, Apantree Sakhakorn, Ernest Fung, Devon Bausch, Anne-Olivia Shelton, Dylan Sears, Beatrix Souza, Maria Joannou, Renee Talmon, Randy Silva, Melanie Schwartz, Sarah Church and Robert Sardy.

You will also find photos of many of our faculty members on the website; they are all identified. (Faculty members in San Francisco have had the opportunity to have photos taken, and in the fall, we will be holding photo shoots on other campuses and giving faculty members there the same opportunity.

Thanks to our contractors: Stein Communications, which did the beautiful design work and Alacrinet, which pulled together all the technical details and installed the new software that runs the site – and will run our portal as well.
Thanks in advance to USGA. Our University-wide Student Government Association is has volunteered to check for broken links.