SUNY Potsdam gets scrappy in tough times: College reinvents virtual tour from scratch

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SUNY Potsdam has reinvented the university virtual tour with its new design.

• One of many conceptual sketches by Director of Marketing Deborah Dudley that were used to build the design framework for SUNY Potsdam’s new virtual tour.
• Each bubble on the virtual tour reveals specialized content, including original photos and videos.

POTSDAM, NY (02/10/2011)(readMedia)-- In the face of state cuts and shrinking budgets, many public colleges have had to reduce funding for admissions outreach, travel and web redesigns.

Faced with continual budget cuts from the state of New York and the challenge of getting families to make the trip to the far reaches of the Adirondack Park and Canadian border, the creative team at The State University of New York at Potsdam decided to innovate, not stagnate.

"We refused to be handcuffed by budget deficits and geographic challenges," said Deb Dudley, director of marketing and communications at SUNY Potsdam. "We may be small, but we've got guts when it comes to taking risks, especially when it comes to showing off where we live and who we are."

SUNY Potsdam, a small public university located northwest of the Adirondack Park Blueline, evaluated a number of out-of-the box tools used by colleges across the country, but decided instead to reinvent the online virtual tour experience in a way that was unique to Potsdam.

By passing on the subscription virtual tour packages that involved heavy production costs and limited illustrations of campus, Potsdam's pioneering spirit ended up saving the College money -- and more.

The result is a tour unlike any other college virtual tour on the Web.

"It wasn't easy," said Director of Web Communications Mindy Thompson, who led the project. "We have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours. This is an intense collection of content displayed in a fun way."

Thompson continued, "It is still not done. It will never be done, but it is something new and dynamic. It gets the job done to illustrate the personality of the College. This is totally original."

Designed like a flow chart with bubbles representing various aspects of campus, the tour allows students to connect to the information they're seeking -- including photos of Potsdam people and videos about what makes the campus a dynamic learning environment.

Every user gets a different experience tailored to his or her own interests. The content on the virtual tour will be constantly updated so that the experience remains fresh and best reflects what is current.

"We had to tackle this project in a different way," said Thompson. "Technically, it had to be easy to use and update. Visually, it had to be fun to play with, but clean and clear and user-driven."

The framework is built on the basic relationships across campus, as well as visual assets associated with each area of college life. With each click, the virtual tour expands into a growing, interconnected web, showing the wealth of possibilities available at SUNY Potsdam as well as how close-knit the campus is. All the content was generated in-house, using Potsdam's guerrilla tactics of grab-and-go photography and video.

"A map and picture of a building can only say so much," said Dudley. "We wanted to capture the conversation that happens on a tour and tell the story of the place, but let the visitor choose the conversation."

The tour allows visitors to drag information of interest to a dock and save it to revisit later or to share through electronic postcards with their friends and family. Admissions counselors can also customize tour highlights to share with prospective students.

The tour was constructed with the assistance of the Maryland-based IDFive Informed Design firm. Built in Flash with a custom CMS developed with PHP and MySQL, the CodeIgniter framework allows SUNY Potsdam to easily edit the tour, creating and linking nodes and adding images, video and maps within them.

"We did have to invest in the back end," said Dudley. "However, we can stuff the tour with so many different glimpses of campus and there are no boundaries to how the tool can grow."

Adobe Illustrator was used to design the application and create graphic elements. The customized management tool is run on campus servers and does not involve subscription fees to third party virtual tour services.

"There is no substitute for a real visit, but this breaks the ice nicely," said Dudley. "We can tell our story in our own scrappy but beautiful way."

To check SUNY Potsdam's new virtual tour out for yourself, visit www.virtualtour.potsdam.edu.

To find out more about visiting SUNY Potsdam, visit www.potsdam.edu/about/visit.

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Founded in 1816, and located on the outskirts of the beautiful Adirondack Park, The State University of New York at Potsdam is one of America's first 50 colleges. SUNY Potsdam currently enrolls approximately 4,350 undergraduate and graduate students. Home to the world-renowned Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam is known for its handcrafted education, challenging liberal arts and sciences core, excellence in teacher training and leadership in the performing and visual arts.

-www.potsdam.edu-