By Abby Zimmer
Copy Editor
Saint Mary’s University athletics website has been recently redesigned thanks to Sports Information Director Donny Nadeau and Vice President of Communication and Marketing Bob Conover.
“I think the new site is so much better than the old site, and I’ve heard a lot of compliments,” said Nadeau. “I think this is because it’s very eye-catching, neat, clean, informative and it’s all right there. If anyone needs anything that has to do with Saint Mary’s athletics, it’s there.”
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The website, redesigned by Internet Consulting Services (ICS), the same company the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference uses for their website, has many new features. Among these features include a calendar feature to show games occurring each day, banners with sports-specific flash photographs, and Athletes of the Week. It also includes Live Stats, which updates as the game is taking place.
“I think the new sports website for Saint Mary’s is a great improvement over the old one,” said sophomore swimmer Tom Walsh. “It’s a lot easier to navigate and it’s much more technologically advanced.”
Athletic Director Nikki Fennern, also impressed by the new website, said, “I love the colors. I love the actions. There’s always something changing on our website; you’re always seeing new pictures popping up. Also, I love that every story has a picture with it because, although you can read about a team, pictures make it more real.”
Yet Fennern’s favorite part of the new website has more to do with Nadeau: the fact that everything is updated instantly.
“Once a game is over, I’ll go into the schedule and I’ll update the score and (with ICS’s system) it is automatically updated in every other place that needs to be updated,” said Nadeau. “Now I don’t have to take four steps; I only have to take one.”
During the redesign this summer, Nadeau transferred 4,520 archived news stories from the old website to ensure that they were in the same format as the rest of the website.
“We could have had a link to the old site and said that for any archived stories, go to the old site,” said Nadeau. “But I didn’t want to do that because my feeling was that if we were going to have a new site, I wanted the new site to be the [only] site.”
Currently, statistics for any SMU sport from the time that sport began are available on the website, and schedules with game results dating just as far back will soon be available.
“The website shows that they care more about their athletics department than before,” said Walsh. “And if your website is well done, it puts out the image that the sports teams are good.”
“As we like to say in athletics, the website is the front porch of the school. If you catch their eye, prospective students are probably going to look around,” said Nadeau. “If they keep coming back [to the website], there’s going to be a reason and if we can keep them there, maybe we can bring them to school here.”
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