Have you happened to notice that TREY’s website has a new look? The structure is lighter, and the homepage highlights the essential information for students! This update has been a long-time dream of this Specialist in Communications and Advocacy, and I thought it would be nice to provide some background in this blog post on how such a project came to be and how the new website ended up looking as nice as it now does!
In June 2022, I opened Word and wrote on the page “Project: Usable and accessible website for TREY (come up with a sexier name)”. I had an idea for an Action Plan project, where those working in TREY’s communications—namely myself and my board members—could allocate time in giving the website a much-needed makeover. I was involved in composing TREY’s website structure in 2018, and even then, in TREY’s early years, it became clear that the structure of the site did not serve students or us working for students in the best possible way. There were multiple subpages and sub-subpages, and the hierarchical structure of them was not intuitively clear for students looking for information. However, it took a few more years for the title “Updating the Structure of the Website” to finally appear in TREY’s Action Plan—the sexier name clearly forgotten.
We started preparing the restructuring of the website in 2024 when we conducted a communications development survey. The results of that survey provided us with valuable feedback regarding the structure of the site and the findability of information. It was crucial to me that when the structure would be updated, it was to be done with a student-centred approach, while drawing from the development survey’s results. I contacted the responsible teacher of the Knowledge-Intensive Services course at Tampere University and inquired whether the restructuring of the student union’s website could fit as one of the projects for the course. To my delight, I received a positive response. Hence, I’d like to thank you, anonymous commenter on TREY’s Action Plan draft of 2025, for bringing up the existence of this course!
A group of students indeed took on our assignment as part of the course in the autumn of 2025. I presented them with the following challenge: “How could the student union’s website be improved to better serve its users, especially students?”. They conducted an observational study, some interviews, and examined the results of TREY’s communications development survey along with the website’s analytics. The result was a long report full of concrete development ideas especially from the perspective of information findability. We also received a demo of what TREY’s website homepage could look like so that it would be easier to find the most relevant elements, such as the events calendar, the service desk opening hours, and the link to the student ID card page.
Even though the website update was planned to be implemented during 2025, I deemed the opportunity to make this course collaboration happen to be more important than keeping to the schedule. So, at the end of November 2025, I sat with my board members in the final seminar of the course, eagerly listening to the group’s presentation on the report. As the new year was approaching, and with it a new TREY Board, I knew that furthering the project would fall on my shoulders. Before Christmas break, I read the report by the students from the course, made notes of it, and sent a long email to Digital Agency Dude, who has coded TREY’s website. I asked them to renew the homepage based on the students’ feedback, to make the site’s search engine more functional, and to make some overall improvements on the website—after the Christmas break, of course. The actual structural update, as in things like reducing the number of subpages, grouping information into a more intuitive format, and cutting unnecessary information, would be my responsibility.
One would think that when you go on Christmas break and know that a big project awaits you at work in January, the predominant feeling would be anxiety. However, I was incredibly excited: I would have something concrete to do to make TREY’s operations and services even more student-centred, to have better communication, and make information more accessible to students. Every hour I spent working on the new website structure in an Excel spreadsheet, copying website text from one tab to another, or fiddling around with the placement of information on the site with my colleagues was worth it, as the result is now genuinely from students to students. The homepage of TREY’s website now features new icons through which you can easily access information on student ID cards, member services, and the opening hours of our service desks. Essential information for association actives can be found with one click. A link to TREY’s events calendar exists as its own banner right after, and TREY’s Instagram feed is embedded there for everyone to see! The Contact Us form can be found at the bottom of the homepage, so sending us questions should also be easier now. The top bar has been designed to serve the needs of students, not organisations, and the number of subpages has been greatly reduced. I hope that the work on the website serves you, dear reader of this text, whether you are a student at our university, an association active, or just someone passing by! There is certainly still room for improvement, and some old links will linger in search engines for a while, but the result can now be found at trey.fi/en!
I want to thank the students of the Knowledge-Intensive Services course from the bottom of my heart: Jesse Pasanen, Eeva Nissinen, Lukas Virtala, Anna Rajala, Kasper Sundqvist, and Veeti Vanha-Kämppä. The work you did to improve TREY’s website was essential for this project to succeed. Thanks are due also to everyone who participated in the observational study of the course! And lastly, I want to thank the people at Digital Agency Dude, with whom working is always effortless and fun! I just reached eight years in the service of the student union last week, and to tell the truth, this project has been one of the most rewarding projects of my career so far. It deepened my understanding of student-centred approaches and helped me to better understand the importance of keeping our target group in mind in future projects. The core value of TREY’s strategy is “Student at the centre of everything” for a reason.