About Cuesta College
~15,000
students
141
certificate programs
78%
students receive financial aid
“We've been a Modern Campus customer for about ten years, and I just love this company and I'm always eager for their new products. Modern Campus is always one step ahead of what we need. And now with the addition of Melody, I would never pick anybody else.
Lana Rauch
The Challenge
Static, PDF campus maps were failing to engage prospective students
Colleges and universities have websites that are made of thousands of web pages. A set of eight web pages takes on average 40-to-100 hours to create.
Managing a website with tens of thousands of pages—and keeping it updated—takes too much time and effort.
Cuesta College was looking to freshen their website and provide their visitors with a better experience. Web Services Coordinator Lana Rauch, who led the project, was a team of one and did not have time to practice XSL coding.
The Solution & Result
Low-code website development tools
Being a one-person army tasked with a massive undertaking, Lana had been looking for a way to make web development quick and efficient. She wanted to create templates she could reuse to create new landing pages.
She considered the solutions available in the market and zeroed in on the leader: Modern Campus CMS, powered by Melody.
We looked at a couple other companies, and Omni was the leader because a lot of other California community colleges use it. Also, the Modern Campus customer service is the best. Customer support is key for me because I'm a one-man shop.
Best-in-class support and training
Lana received all the support she needed to learn how to use and create reusable templates with drag-and-drop frames and tiles. She wanted to create a variety of templates that the college’s many content providers could quickly use to publish their content while maintaining brand integrity. Melody came in handy to help build these templates and layouts.
I just can't tell you how excited I am to not have to do XSL coding. Creating these page templates in Melody is going to make creation of pages so much faster!
The Future
With Melody, Lana has the ability and confidence to redesign Cuesta’s entire website.
We are just starting to talk about a redesign, and Melody is going to factor in greatly. I want to be able to give our users the ability to have a three-column layout without any issues.
Lana is so confident in the power of Melody that she does not think twice before recommending it.
If you’re using an open-source CMS, you're going to either spend money with a developer to configure the open-source code, or you can spend money on Modern Campus CMS. And to someone in my position setting up new areas on the website, I’d say, ‘Absolutely set them up using Melody. Don't even think twice about it.’
Tackle your biggest challenges
About Modern Campus
Modern Campus is obsessed with empowering its nearly 2,000 higher education customers to thrive when radical transformation is required to respond to lower student enrollments and revenue, rising costs, crushing student debt, and administrative complexity.
The Modern Campus engagement platform powers solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement and development, conversational text messaging, career pathways, and campus maps and virtual tours. The result: innovative institutions can create a learner-to-earner lifecycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency.
Learn how Modern Campus is leading the modern learner engagement movement at moderncampus.com and follow us on LinkedIn.