The Washburn University school Web site is about to undergo a makeover as new webmaster Shane Bartley prepares to make serious alterations to the site. New to the position, Bartley is responsible for updating and making fundamental changes to the school site that will generate more interest in the university.

Bartley began his college career at Hutchinson Community College, but he finished his education with a degree in advertising from Kansas University. Married with two children, Bartley grew up in the Hutchinson area, but decided he preferred the Lawrence and Topeka area after graduating from KU.

Bartley said his main responsibility as webmaster is to focus on the reconstruction of the Web site. There are a lot of people working on the advertising and marketing of Washburn, but the webmaster position was created to allow specific focus on the area of web design Bartley said.

Bartley’s first order of business will be to redesign the Web site and implement a new Content Management System for web development on campus. The change will affect many major departments that have pages on the site, as they are converted to the new CMS.

“This conversion will assist in recruitment and consistency in what the public views of Washburn University on the Web,” said Bartley.

Departments that will be directly affected include all major administrative and academic departments and pages. Departments that are not included in the site conversion include individual academic departments such as Psychology, as well as individual pages concerning faculty, the Law school, KTWU, KAW, athletics, the Mulvane, school libraries, MyWashburn and the Washburn Endowment Association.

“The main goal of the new Web site is to get a good feel of Washburn out to the community,” said Bartley. “We want students to say ‘hey, I want to go here.’ It’s a good marketing strategy where people can have 24-hour access to the university.”

Once the conversion process is complete, training will be provided to help users with the new process of updating Web pages.

“An added bonus is that you do not need any special software to update your pages; just a computer, Internet connection and Web browser,” said Bartley, concerning the post-CMS conversion updates.

Though Bartley is still getting used to his new responsibilities as webmaster, he is hopeful that the new design will help Washburn reach its ultimate goal of reaching out and attracting more students to the university.