Kenyon: General recommendations: Content

Wherever possible, pieces written by Kenyon staff, faculty and students in their own voices.

Kenyon’s appeal— beyond academic excellence and its unique location— lies in the relationships among students, faculty and staff. We will seek to reinforce this theme throughout the site’s content.

Kenyon’s major, acknowledged areas of dominance— creative writing, English, humanities, etc.— will be prominently featured on the site, as they attract the majority of Kenyon students. But we’ll make sure that less well known programs are also highlighted; in some cases, these programs (such as the networked, collaborative science departments) have developed into unique offerings out of the spotlight.

As much as possible given the technical environment, we’ll try to find ways to allow Kenyon staff, faculty and students to collaboratively share content. This could mean encouraging students to submit news stories, or working with the CMS to display feeds of Kenyon news across departmental sites.

Admission’s appeal to students and their parents should be driven entirely by a goal of direct communication. As we’ve said already, profiles should be written in the first person whenever possible; photos and videos should be informal, not overly produced, and engaging; and there should be gateways for prospective students to directly contact (or be contacted by) current Kenyon students.

Without exception, every student we talked with at Kenyon loved Gambier. Most of them said the same thing: “I’ll be living in a big city all my life. This is my one chance at small-town life.” We want to get this idea across on the site.

As another student told us directly, “to say Gambier is in the middle of nowhere is an insult to the people who live here.” There is a lot going on out here in the Ohio cornfields, and the world should hear more about it.

All site text should be thoughtfully written and gramatically correct; although there’s often pressure to get a story up as quickly as possible, we believe all content should be carefully read through before posting.

In the case of top-level text (used on homepage, section and departmental homepages, etc.) we recommend more attention than that. The tone of top-level text should be knowing, engaging, direct and sometimes witty. There should be general consistency of voice across all top level site text.