Thursday, March 2, 2023

Dear UNT Community,

This week, I’m proud to share that UNT’s Web Development team in the Division of University Brand Strategy and Communications (UBSC) launched our new unt.edu website to unify our look and improve the function of the entire UNT web experience. The new OmniCMS (Content Management System) for our website will make creating and maintaining webpages easier and provide functionality that will help keep our online information as current and competitive as possible, and perhaps most important – it includes huge advances in accessibility.

The new UNT homepage was built with our prospective students in mind since our web presence is our No. 1 recruiting tool, and we wanted our future students to be able to readily – and more easily – access information and resources about admissions, academic programs and career readiness so they can begin their journey with us. In addition, we are now using Funnelback on the site to improve UNT’s SEO rankings. The team also completely re-envisioned how academic program information is presented on the web so that we can better showcase career options for students in a way that makes sense to them.

This website launch is the first public step in a massive web overhaul — commonly referred to as “fixing the UNT web,” which brought together partners from across campus and UNT System units like ITSS to ensure project success.

The next phase of this multi-year project – moving more than 330 additional websites into OmniCMS – is only just beginning. The goal is to move as many of them as possible by November 2023 as the team monitors Drupal’s end-of-life date and begins scheduling with campus partners to make the transition. However, it is important to know that subsequent phases of this project will be scheduled throughout the next academic year.

Much care and creativity went into this project, and I know that future and current students now are more readily able to discover the resources and information they need to join and succeed in our Mean Green Family. If you haven’t already, go check out the new web experience at unt.edu. If you have feedback, you can share it with ubsc@unt.edu.

UNT Proud,
Neal Smatresk
UNT President