Linn-Benton Community College has used the same website for over a decade. Imagine, then, the surprise of current students who visited the site at the beginning of January, only to find that the header image was now moving.
The site’s looping aerial video of Albany campus is the first eye-catching change to www.linnbenton.edu, which launched a redesign at the beginning of winter 2025. Intended to consolidate and reorganize information that had been scattered across a maze of outdated pages, the site now boasts a sleek new layout, snappier navigation on mobile devices, and automatic translation into other languages.
“We had received multiple years of student feedback,” said Justene Malosh, LBCC’s webmaster and director of institutional effectiveness, “that it was difficult to find things [on the website], and when they did find things they were often out of date.”
These complaints eventually led to a two-year process of redesigning the site that was kickstarted by a small grant from the Lumina Foundation, an independent organization committed to improving higher education across the United States. This funding allowed Malosh to assemble a small team to fix these pain points and bring LBCC’s site into the modern era, including: Danny Aynes, registrar and primary contact for systems such as WebRunner and DegreeWorks; and Virginia Mallory, director of high school partnerships, recruitment, and marketing.
Malosh had worked with LBCC’s previous web management team, but most of them have since moved on from the college to other pursuits.
The project’s first year was spent doing literal legwork. “It’s just a lot of content,” said Aynes. Negotiating what information was available on the site, what needed to be updated or removed, and how it could be better organized was the main focus. He recalls that “it took a lot of meetings with departments to figure out ‘What are you trying to convey?’ and ‘How can you convey it?’”
As a result, he noticed that “a lot of the information went from six web pages down to one.”
“We involved [the different departments] in our process, and we would try to regularly communicate where we were with the project,” Mallory added. “That helped everyone participate and have their voices heard.”
One example of the improvements that came from these discussions was the idea of using tab layouts for different departments. This allows all of the relevant information to be accessible without having to load multiple pages, improving efficiency for the site and convenience for users.
Another more subtle change is to the site’s search function. While the search bar may only look different cosmetically, the team has implemented an improved search algorithm to make results more accurate. This will lead to users spending more time viewing the information they are searching for, and less time actually finding it.
The second year of the project was spent doing the actual coding, and was mostly done by Malosh. Working with the same web host, Modern Campus, the team revisited how the site was built internally. Previously they only hosted the website, with LBCC handling all the actual coding. Now, Modern Campus also makes “building blocks” that Malosh uses to assemble the different parts of the site, a welcome change from manually typing out massive amounts of code.
This modular nature allows for the seamless addition of new content and features to the site, such as the option to translate the entire site into a different language without a third-party program. In addition, when accessed from a mobile device the site can detect the user’s preferred language and auto-translate accordingly. Currently this feature is only supported in English and Spanish, but Malosh notes that they are working with the International Students Department to determine what languages would be most helpful to add.
She also wanted to bring attention to an updated feature that many users had previously found to be cumbersome: the LBCC directory. By scrolling to the bottom of the site and selecting “Departments,” the user can now access a neatly organized page of all current staff, searchable by name or department. This is a welcome change from the old drop-down menus that felt like something out of an early ’90s phone directory.
What does the future hold for this new layout? Malosh notes that they are going to be closely watching the analytics of the site during its launch period, using this data to continue making improvements to the site’s usability for students.
This article originally appeared in the February 2025 edition of The Commuter.
