Hello Beaver Family!

As you can tell, Bemidji State’s website recently changed. Go Beavers! Let’s be sure you can still find what you need.

Our homepage is broken up into several sections that we hope will improve your experience as a user. While the navigation and layout is similar to what you may have experienced in the past, some things have changed. The home page has seven main sections which are, from top to bottom:

1. A black toolbar which includes:
   1. Affinity Group landing pages (top left)
      1. These landing pages contain curated links to content tailored for specific audiences
   2. A simplified toolbar menu (top right)
      1. Easy access to the Minnesota State Universal Application, the BSU directory, the MyBSU login landing page and search.
2. Main site navigation with a specialized call-to-action bar
   1. Main site navigation is similar to what it was on the old site, with the exception of “Student Life,” which has been renamed to “Campus Life”.
      1. The “About” page has launched with a new landing page design. Rather than including a traditional flyout menu, this landing page includes large, visually appealing blocks to invite site visitors deeper into this section’s content. This is a preview of our future plans for the Academics and Admissions landing pages.
3. A featured image
   1. We have retired the “circle package” as our main storytelling tool for the website and are now focusing on a single, large image with a caption that leads to additional content.
      1. While the intent is that this be a single lead element in most situations, we do have the capacity to scroll through several different images (and, soon, videos) using navigation arrows that will appear when you hover your mouse over the left or right edges of the main photo
4. Four featured stories
   1. These stories are curated by the Office of Communications & Marketing and are meant to hold content we wish to feature on the homepage for more than a short period of time (i.e. longer than a few days). This is not intended to hold news, event, or activity information, but to be focused more on significant admissions-related information or evergreen marketing content.
5. A primary content block
   1. We are currently using this primary content block to encourage visitors to explore a list of our academic programs. We have a lot of design and content flexibility with this space, so by all means let us know what you think when you see changes here.
6. News and Events
   1. This section works in essentially the same way our previous website did; the news section is a non-curated list of the four most-recent posts to BSU News, which has been redesigned to better serve content to the new homepage and to future pages coming during the redesign process, and the next four events coming chronologically on the LiveWhale events calendar.
7. An expanded footer
   1. This expanded footer includes links to more campus resources than our previous footer and provides an additional opportunity to repeat the three main admissions-focused calls to action for the website’s homepage — apply, visit, request info.

The homepage is new and we are working through launch issues.