Anatomy of a redesign: Inside Oregon State University’s online program page transformation

Oregon State University delivers 125+ degrees, certificates and microcredentials online to learners in all 50 states and more than 50 countries. In 2024, we on the Oregon State Ecampus marketing and communications team began the process of revising and reorganizing the content on program pages — transitioning from a multi-page microsite to a hyper-focused, single-page format — to better meet the needs of prospective students. 

In this session, we’ll outline the assessment process and provide key insights that guided the decision to make this transition, including our team’s extensive UX considerations, SEO knowledge and user-testing process. The transition to single-page format led to various notable changes in our content strategy: a more intentional SEO approach, a template-based content structure, shorter word counts, clearer messaging and some incorporation of AI tools.

These changes have overall been a net positive, but they have introduced some challenges. Writing to a shorter word count — and using approachable language to  meet our SEO goals — has led to some tension between marketing and technical teams, for example. Oregon State delivers many technical-focused degrees, including many in fields such as engineering and agriculture. We’ll outline our team’s response, including the use of AI tools to decode dense language. 

This session will include detailed before-and-after examples and provide useful strategies that any marketing team can use to write and design program pages for modern reading and web user habits