Nov. 1, 2017 | Midwestern State University | thewichitan.com | Your Campus. Your News. | Vol. 82 No. 10
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Mustangs Rally
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Check out what booths were recruiting at Mustangs Rally. 2010
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Website’s new look, feel targets prospective students ing to look at ways that captivate and capture that audience,” Gaynor said. “We work very closely with admissions he MSU website has a new look — for instance, one of the things that — an updated design that is sure we put on kind of last minute was our to catch the eye of any prospecvirtual tour. We had taken it down and tive student, active student or parent talked to admissions and admissions that stumbles upon mwsu.edu. The said ‘no, we get a lot of direct hits off of website was redesigned to be easier to that link.’” use, more pleasing to the eye and an Another change on the redesign is overall much cleaner look, according the MSU Texas on the top of the page. to Matt Shirey, webmaster, and Julie MSU Texas is part of the capital camGaynor, director of marketing and paign that Suzanne Shipley, university public information. president, proposed last spring. “My main role would be writing “The design implementation has code here at MSU. I’ve been writing been planned for well over a year and code for five years here, but I first startwe just had some stops and starts. We ed writing code in 2006,” Shirey said. had planned to do that regardless and The last time they redesigned the when MSU Texas came along, we just website was five years ago when Shirey needed to incorporate that into our defirst accepted a job here. “We tried not to make to big of The new home page was published in early October. The last revi- sign,” Gaynor said. “It seems like it all came about at the same time. We knew a change. We actually looked at the sion to the website was five years ago. it was time for a new fresh look to the websites of other universities like Texas A&M and UNT. The redesign focused on eye-catching images for cur- website and it just so happened that they kind of coincided.” Bold letters overlaying the pictures that say “Live, Lead and Learn” rent or prospective students,” Shirey said. When a new device searches the website, the previous website design sit at the top of the new design. “It’s very simple. There are a lot of images that portray the university will come up until the user refreshes the page and will then display the redesign. According to Gaynor, analytics drove the design team — but so that prospective students get a sense of what the university is like just there was also a committee consisting of faculty, staff and a student rep- from looking at pictures. We knew based on the trends that we had seen that we wanted something much simpler and cleaner,” Gaynor said. resentative to be in the loop about the website design decisions. Some argued that the website did not need a redesign and was fine “One of the goals that we want for the website is for it to be a recruiting tool for prospective students and prospective parents. We are trysee WEBSITE pg. 3 JAVIER SUAREZ REPORTER
Trick-or-Treat
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Children decked out in Halloween gear trick-or-treated throughout Killingsworth.
Downtown
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Wichita Falls is not as boring as you think, downtown offers a variety of shops to visit.
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