Dear Campus Community,

As the year draws to a close, we want to provide you with an update on improvements to the university website. Not only is the website the first place many people encounter our institution, it is also a primary communication tool used to engage and inform a wide variety of audiences, including prospective students and families, current students and families, faculty, staff, alumni, donors, and the wider community. When we launched the new Puget Sound website in June 2021, we knew there would be significant challenges to overcome. No website rollout is perfect, but thanks to your thoughtful feedback, we continue to improve the website experience and are pleased to share our progress on a few major projects:

  • Improving search functionality is our highest priority. Content editors now have the ability to add keywords to their pages to improve their visibility in search and, by the end of the year, we expect to resolve an issue where pages from our old site appear in search results.
  • We have also made headway on fixing broken links, working closely with website editors across campus to identify and rebuild links that didn’t transfer to our new site.
  • We restored the website’s connection to the PeopleSoft database, allowing for automatic updates to faculty and course information.
  • The marketing and communications team updates the homepage (our most visited page) weekly with news and events, enrollment messaging, and eye-catching visuals to keep the page up-to-date and relevant.
  • We are happy to help individual website users troubleshoot problems and have successfully closed more than 1,900 service tickets since the launch of the website.

In the coming year, we look forward to working with the campus community to further improve and refine the website. If you notice a problem with search results, please report it using the search issues form. Dealing with web issues can be frustrating - we appreciate your patience and willingness to collaborate with us to find solutions. Thank you for your partnership in building a communications tool that best serves all of our users.

Sincerely,

Victor Martin | Vice President for University Relations