The News@Northeastern site that Geoff House and I designed and developed as Hifinit grabbed a Gold 2013 CASE Excellence Award in the category of Online News Sites.

CASE may not be a big name in web design awards, but it is big deal in the world of higher education. From the CASE website:

CASE District I annually bestows its Excellence Awards on individuals and schools doing innovative work in the fields of special events, fundraising, stewardship, volunteer engagement, alumni relations, student alumni initiatives, advancement services, and commu­ni­cations.

We tied for Gold with Boston University. Yale grabbed a bronze and Boston College came away with an honorable mention. Not too shabby company, eh?

A website is nothing without great content, so congrats to the web and news teams at North­eastern for developing such great content! We’re happy that we could help them design a new home for all of the great stories they generate, and in doing so increase readership.

Our goals at the outset were to create a better reading experience on mobile devices and help readers find related content more easily. As a result, we garnered some pretty impressive metrics over the old site’s previous years performance. (Measured by Google Analytics, comparing averaged data from a 6 month period, 2012 (new site) compared to 2011 (old site).)

  • Overall Visits up 53.06%
  • Overall Pageviews up 70.01%
  • Overall Pages per visit up 11.07%
  • Mobile-​​specific visits up 190.91%
  • Mobile-​​specific visit duration up 27.66%

I’m looking forward to more collaboration with the news team to roll out some more features later this year. For now, check out the site here.