New College of Ed website enables #NextGiantLeaps with program finder, streamlined navigation
The College of Education launched a new website in late October to better serve prospective and current students and others who want information about Education programs at Purdue University. It is the first College at Purdue to do a full WordPress-to-Wordpress conversion to the current Purdue theme.
The redesigned website showcases the wide variety of successes contributing to the College’s high ranking as the #47 Education Studies subject area program in the world, #20 in the U.S. for earning an education degree, and #14 Best Public University (Times Higher Education World University Rankings, 2025).
Following Purdue’s lead of a new web theme launched in 2024, the College of Education began its website conversion process a year ago. Kerri Richardson, web developer, and Pablo Moore, associate web designer and digital media specialist, began the process in October 2024 by auditing the former website, researching other Purdue units’ and peer institutions’ websites, focusing on best practices, improving accessibility, and liaising with Purdue Brand Studio and Purdue IT.
“They reduced the number of our webpages from over 600 to about 300, deleted PDFs by changing their content to an accessible digital format, fully updated the College’s programs, and streamlined its information,” said DeEtte Starr, director of the College’s Office of Communications, which oversees the website. “The result is a much leaner, more user-friendly website.”
A highlight of the new design is a “program finder” built by Richardson and Moore from one of the new theme’s blocks. The program finder will help prospective and current students to more easily find and learn about College majors and programs they’re interested in. A top landing page is “Become a Teacher” for prospective students.
Another improvement involved merging two unwieldy faculty/staff directories – which required updates to be entered twice – into one directory listing faculty, graduate students, and staff.
Navigation is simplified and consistent across the multitude of College undergraduate, graduate, and online programs. News items are saved for five years and events are archived after they’ve happened. Research includes the College’s groundbreaking AI and Data Science initiative, and the Colleges’ 10 research centers are prominently featured.
“Your attention to detail and hard work on this project is evident on every page,” said Brad Beutler, director of Creative Digital Services for Purdue Brand Studio. “Your team helped us improve the theme along the way, which we very much appreciate and this is good for all of Purdue.”
The College thanks Kerri and Pablo for their organized, thorough, hard work which will help #BoilermakerEducators at Purdue and beyond to take their Next Giant Leap!”