Reimagining the Aims website experience
Project Skills
Digital Transformation
Web Design
Change Management
Partnerships
Brand Strategy
Strategic Planning
Adopting a Marketing-Centric Approach to Content Creation: Enhancing Engagement through Strategic Design and an Elevated User Experience.
Aims Community College is dedicated to fostering better communities. This commitment is reflected in their passionate instructors, state-of-the-art facilities, and small class sizes. They strive to enhance the quality of life and boost economic vitality in Colorado, offering diverse educational opportunities to individuals from all backgrounds.
Before October 2021, their website did not live up to this commitment. Over two years, I led a skilled team in a comprehensive overhaul of the website experience. This project aimed to serve better prospective and current students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.
I focused on three primary areas: technical improvements, SEO optimization, and content revision of the existing website. The process began with journey mapping, card sorting, and other audience-centric exercises, engaging students and staff to understand their needs and insights. This approach provided a clear project roadmap.
Through several design iterations, we developed a brand-compliant design system that facilitated easy site authoring and offered hundreds of design choices across the site.
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We rewrote over 200 degree and certificate pages, adopting a marketing-first approach to content. This strategy was central to enhancing the site's search engine ranking, resulting in a 150-200% increase in content volume per degree page.
Project Success Stats
Year-over-year comparrision post-new website launch
35%
more total users
40%
more page views
34%
decline in bounce rate
Project Highlights
Program Sort Tool
The newly enhanced website features an innovative degree sort tool that significantly improves the user experience for prospective students. Unlike traditional academic landing pages, which can be overwhelming, this tool allows individual degrees to stand out, making it easier for students to find the information they need.
Our research and analytics confirm that students prefer to explore specific degrees directly rather than navigating through entire academic departments.
The degree sort tool is versatile and user-friendly, offering searches based on keywords, program types, campus locations, interests, and Career Pathways, enabling students to tailor their educational journey with precision and ease.
Enhanced Landing Pages
Significant strategic effort has been invested in the design of top-level landing pages, such as the Student Services page, to greatly benefit both prospective and current students.
These pages consolidate various opportunities into a single, accessible location, simplifying the user experience and ensuring that students can easily access the resources they need.
This streamlined approach not only enhances navigation but also maximizes the utility of our site’s content.
Events Calendar
As a key component of our website overhaul, we introduced a new events calendar.
Powered by Localist and tailored to align with the college's branding, this tool significantly enhances how events are displayed and accessed.
Within the project, we utilized the Localist API to integrate custom widgets into Drupal, the site’s CMS, allowing for the automatic display of topic-specific events on relevant pages. Additionally, the API integration enables the site's search engine to directly retrieve event information, eliminating the need to navigate multiple platforms.
This integration provides a smoother, more cohesive user experience.
Video Project
A unique video was produced for each college degree, enhancing content depth and enabling the marketing team to launch degree-specific campaigns effectively.
Hosting
The college transitioned from self-hosting to a cloud-hosted solution, reducing downtime and enhancing site speed.
Accessibility
The new website ensures accessibility for all, aiming for AA conformance under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v2.1 (WCAG 2.1).
Document Library
To streamline document management, a Document Library was created to host all site documents and web form links, featuring filters by title, tags, degree, and more. Integration with Okta enables restricted access for specific user groups like students and faculty.
Spanish Translation
The site’s utility navigation includes a one-click Spanish translation, supporting inclusivity for our 30% native Spanish-speaking demographic.
Search
Enhancing the search tool was a key focus during the project's kick-off. The new site features a weighting system to refine search results based on various factors, with options to manually promote or hide results.
Project Awards
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It's clean and easy to navigate, and I just love how much our programs are promoted through short videos. The academic layout for each program is succinct and easy to navigate and comprehend. It's a classy piece of work!
Charlotte Parnell
Admissions Counselor
Aims Community College
Strategic Marketing Leadership & Institutional Impact
Marketing Campaign Awards & Recognition
Gold award for Affordability Campaign in Education Digital Marketing Awards for Digital Advertising
Platinum awards for "All In" Marketing Campaign and video spot, plus Gold award for promotional materials (Aims Artistic T-shirt) at MarCom Awards
Led the development and implementation of the "All In" brand tagline through research, brainstorming, surveys, and focus groups