As associate director of Web communications at Drury University, Mandy Seaman has a lot to do.

She took a break from her busy schedule to talk about the newly redesigned Drury website. She touched on her background in the field, the thought process going into the redesign, some of the site’s new features, and the future of Web communications as a whole.

So I know you have your BA in journalism and a MS in communication. How did you end up in Web Services?

Not at all the direction I thought I was going to go with my career. I graduated with my undergrad in journalism and went to work at a newspaper … and it turns out that I hated it. So I decided to go back to grad school and focus more on writing and communications, less on hard news. I returned to Springfield, went to Missouri State, and got my master’s in communications.

While I was there, I worked as a travel writer, which was really cool; I got to travel around the United States. I would take paid vacations and then write about them. I saw this position open up at Drury for a Web content person and was looking for a change, something with more structure than my job as a travel writer. So I started working here in 2007 as the Web editor and worked my way up.

So Web media was new for you at the time?

It was. The travel company I had worked for was all Internet-based. So all of the writing and copyrighting I was doing was for the website. There was no printed materials, nothing like that; it was all for the Web. So I kind of cut my teeth if you will on Web writing there and learned a lot about online advertising, search-engine optimization — all those types of things. It was business-orientated; we were all about revenue, somewhat different than how we are at Drury. It was all about generating leads and things like that, so I learned more of the business side of things there.

Since Drury is not revenue-based, what are Web services about?

Well, it is. At the end of the day, we are nonprofit, but we are still a business. We are in the business of attracting prospective students, retaining current students, and telling Drury’s story. Our department is part of marketing and communications. A lot of people think of us as a technology department; we don’t think of ourselves as a technology department. We are absolutely a marketing department.

So what fueled the changes to the website? Obviously, it had been that way for a while.

That is actually the main fuel. There was a lot of reasons. This redesign should have happened a long time ago. The system we were running on was implemented in 2001, which, because of how fast technology changes, was ancient. The other problem with it was that it wasn’t even ever built to do what we were making it do. It had been customized by the developers in this department over 15 years, and I feel really bad when I say this, but it was sort of a nightmare. We had Frankensteined it together.

We had a lot of limitation on features and tools, so people and departments who wanted to tell their stories, we would have to say no to. The more we got into that, the more we realized why are we trying to make this thing that doesn’t work anymore work this way.

Was it torn down entirely and built anew?

Absolutely. That’s what is kind of different about this. We have redesigned the website multiple times over the years. In 2001 is when we first went to a dynamic content management system-based website that wasn’t just static pages. Since then it has undergone a lot of different redesigns, but that is all it has been. It’s been the same backend, technology, and language. We had just re-skinned everything, a couple of times we changed the navigation, but this time, we decided this is so broken we are not going to try and fix it, we are just going to rebuild it.

Was there a set criterion of goals? Did you say, “This is what we want it to do,” or was it just functioning in the same old role that it had been and just looked nicer?

Oh, no. We absolutely had a lot of changes. We kind of laugh down here a little bit just because to most people who look at it, it just looks different and works a little different. But to us, we know it’s so vastly different, what this system can do and what this website can do. Obviously, our biggest goal was to make the website responsive; we felt we were kind of behind on that. …We have watched year by year our number of how many of our users are mobile. …We wanted our navigation to be a little more clean, clearer.

Then — this is a struggle that is not unique to Drury at all, and it is not really unique to higher education —… how do you manage? There was a point in time where we had 30,000 pages, and we cleaned it up a lot. We are much closer to 11,000 now, but still, that is huge. We were so locked down trying to maintain consistency that our content managers couldn’t really do anything.

How do you anticipate Web communication changing in the future?

I think it will be fascinating because you saw this shift towards user-driven content, and now with social media, where now everyone is a content manager. If you are asking from a professional perspective of being in charge of the communications online for my company or organization, how do I temper that or make sure I’m controlling the brand but still letting the users … in on that conversation and selling the brand or talking about it? I think that is the challenge, and I think that is the key — is learning kind of how to bottle this and use it to my advantage while not controlling it too much.