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Larger colleges and universities often have dozens or more subsites for each campus, division or department. Problems arise when the manager of each of these subsites maintains control over the look, feel and functionality. For instance, the content manager of the athletics department may prefer to use a completely different color scheme, page layout and even an old logo. Think it’s no big deal? Think again. Here are just a few ways inconsistency can negatively impact your higher education brand.

Lack of Credibility – There is a certain level of trust associated with brand consistency. When a visitor clicks through your higher education website and sees a multitude of vastly different pages, he or she may feel that the lack of uniformity means your college or university isn’t quite as credible as another. That means you could be losing prospective students.

Compliance Issues – Disjointed web pages can cause more than just a bad user experience. They can actually land your school in hot water if the content shared within isn’t properly assessed and maintained. One inappropriately phrased sentence could turn into a lawsuit and bad PR for your higher education brand.

Lack of Efficiency – Antiquated and disconnected subsites are not efficient to maintain. Delivery of new content may be delayed and the entire process can take much longer in general, since content managers often have to start from scratch whenever changes are being made.

Costly Waste of Resources – When subsites aren’t maintained through a centralized CMS dashboard, changes to branding can take weeks or even months to roll out. This can cost your university precious time and valuable money that could be better spent elsewhere.

How can these issues be dealt with? Simple. A modern CMS system that is specifically designed to support the needs of the higher education industry. With such a system in place, you can:

• Develop and implement the use of templates to facilitate speed of content delivery
• Establish and maintain brand consistency across the entire web platform
• Dramatically cut costs by saving time and money on branding exercises
• Create a better user experience and a better image of your brand

With a tool like AcademicsWeb, you can avoid all of the headaches listed above and make the lives of your content managers easier and more efficient while also establishing cohesion across all of your higher education websites.

Ready to get started? Request a free demo today!

TAGGED: Tags: content management, branding