Northern Kentucky University will unveil a completely redesigned website on May 11, replacing the current platform that has been patched and propped up since its last refurbishment in 2016. 

The redesign touches nearly every part of what Chief Marketing Officer Peggy Casey calls NKU’s “digital front door,” from the underlying technology and navigation structure to the visual design. 

The goal: give the site more curb appeal for prospective students. 

NKU’s current site, which sees an average of 740,000 views per month, operates on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), a content management system (CMS) that NKU utilized to develop site-specific web components around 2015.

However, the latest versions of AEM no longer support these custom-built components. NKU had to decide to either rebuild within the new version (akin to building a new website, while still paying Adobe’s premium prices) or find a new CMS. NKU’s contract with Adobe is nearing its expiration, which was also a factor to consider.

Faculty and staff who have tried to update content on the current site described a frustrating experience, with some simple edits spiraling into hours of troubleshooting. Madison Puckett, Manager of Communication and Events at NKU’s College of Informatics, recalled spending roughly two hours trying to add a single “Learn More” button to a faculty bio page. Another staff member described making pages, then tweaking them a small amount at a time just to avoid breaking something else.

Students have also shared grievances of broken links, outdated information and convoluted navigation when asked about the current site.

Marketing and Communications (MarComm), in partnership with NKU’s IT department, began the search for a replacement system for the website in 2023. In summer 2025, NKU officially partnered with Hanson Inc., an integrated marketing and web development agency, to act as a vendor facilitating the selection process and leading the redesign.

After evaluating about five platforms, the university selected Cascade, a CMS built specifically for colleges and universities. Miami University, Xavier University and Morehead State University are among other institutions that already use Cascade.

The transfer was helped along by Hanson using artificial intelligence to scrape NKU’s existing web content, including page text, headings, images and documents. 

“This made [the migration process] so much easier,” Casey said with a sigh of relief.

Casey put the new site’s page count around 3,800, still a significant reduction from the current version’s sprawling 19,000 pages documented in a university procurement filing.

The overhaul is more than a retouch, as it extends into the site’s core structure.

Content currently hosted on inside.nku.edu will be integrated into the nku.edu domain. Side-column menus and submenus will be knocked out entirely. “Quick Links,” the navigation drop-down menu to direct the most common clicks, will be replaced with audience-centered landing pages for groups such as prospective students, current students, faculty and staff, alumni and community partners.

Visually, the new site now presents with white as the base color, replacing the current design that leans on black as its dominant color. NKU’s gold and black are used as accents. Staff who have previewed it describe the look as brighter, cleaner and more organized.

Users navigating between colleges housed within NKU will also find the same layout and labeling conventions extended to all pages, regardless of which college visited, a deliberate choice to ease the journey for potential students comparison-shopping programs. 

That effort also extends to the language of the new site. 

“I think one thing they’re trying to do, which is really important, is just be more consistent on the language that we use across the site,” said Abby Ober, associate director of marketing for the College of Informatics, and one of the roughly 200 web editors across campus authorized to update NKU’s current site.

“For example, the College of Informatics has two schools within it: Media and Communication and Computing and Analytics. But other colleges call [their equivalent of COI’s schools] departments [instead]. So, Arts and Sciences, it has the English Department, not a ‘school.’” 

The “Find a Program” feature will act as a standardization for those distinctions. Said Ober, “We can have minors under there, certificates under there, and so people can see everything that’s available.”

Ober described this as also bridging a gap between how NKU talks about its programs internally and how students actually search for them. 

“One of our majors is called Electronic Media and Broadcasting, but [a prospective student] could be looking for, ‘I want to do videography for ESPN,’ right? … How do we make sure those words hit and direct them [to the website]?” Ober said. 

This intersects with a broader shift Casey’s team has been tracking, an increasing share of web traffic now arrives through AI-powered tools and chatbots rather than traditional search engines. The new site works to connect wider concepts into searchable terms using improved keyword planning. 

The renovation also rewires how the site is managed. Under the old system, anyone with AEM credentials and approval could technically access all 19,000 pages of the full site with no restraints. The new Cascade CMS introduces a role-based permission chain where some staff can suggest edits that must then be approved by a designated gatekeeper within their college, while larger structural changes require sign-off from Marketing and Communications.

MarComm has met with leadership or representatives in each college to walk staff through the new workflows, and those check-ins are expected to continue after launch. The partnership between IT and MarComm has been central throughout, with IT owning the license and overseeing the new infrastructure, and MarComm leading editorial and design decisions.

On the MarComm side is Blake Tharp, who enrolled at NKU around the time the current site launched and now spearheads the project to build its replacement, drawing on the skills he acquired as a student.

“I came to NKU as a student with a dream of making websites for a living,” Tharp said in a written statement to The Northerner, “and to help rebuild my alma mater’s website is a full circle moment. While the rebuild was necessary for many reasons, this has also been a passion project I’m incredibly proud of. To make something that can help people find themselves at NKU, like I once did, is more meaningful to me than I can describe.”

The May 11 launch also means the new site goes live at the end of the spring semester. This gives the team a full summer to work through any issues or unexpected items before the next period of fall enrollment.

“It’s going to be a continual work in progress,” Casey said, emphasizing that is exactly what it should be. “If we’re stuck too long without an update, [that’s when] we’re in trouble.”