Changes Ahead for Website Navigation

The college website’s navigation has remained pretty much the same since 2017. Although Marketing and Communication completed a site redesign in 2025, at that time the office lacked the information needed to inform changes based on users’ behavior.

The current navigation, such as the primary menu bar that runs across the top of most pages, is derived from the college’s organizational chart. The language used in several key links reflects an employee viewpoint, resulting in the use of terminology and sometimes even jargon.

People unaffiliated with the college, on the other hand, form searches by describing what they want to do and/or know. Our website simply was not premised on that approach. As a result, there is a mismatch. How the site organizes things and what it calls them differs from what external audiences want and how they look for it.

How does Marketing and Communication know this?

The data tells the story.

Over the last three months, Web Marketing Specialist Matt Gagliardi has cross-referenced Google Search Console search data with Google Analytics traffic and web feedback submissions to understand what people search for. Here’s what he found (in round numbers):

• Workforce and Community programs (119,000 searches)
• Admissions and Costs (81,000)
• Savor and the Niagara Falls Culinary Institute (70,000)
• Tuition (49,000)
• Financial Aid (33,000)

Links to pages about many of these topics are either buried in the current menu or not labeled with the words people use. That means that we’ve been inadvertently hiding our highest value content.

The proposed navigation will fix that by grouping links around what visitors are trying to do — like pay a bill, apply for admission, explore programs, or find financial aid — and putting our most used services front and center. It’s also built with mobile in mind, since most of our traffic now comes from smart phone users, not desktop computer or tablet users.

Revisiting navigation is just the next step in modernizing the website. Marketing and Communication expects to finalize the new menu in the coming weeks. The goal is simple: less searching, more finding.