BridgeValley Community and Technical College
WEB DESIGN
Following a merger of two community colleges, BridgeValley’s initial website was created without researching user needs. Following years of new pages and PDFs added without a plan, the college president engaged 25th Hour to redesign the entire website.
The 25th Hour research team conducted extensive research, which allowed me to work with stakeholders, as well as our internal project team, to redesign the site from an outside user perspective instead of an internal college department perspective. This required a tremendous amount of change management skills and understanding that many staff were wedded to the previous website.
As the sole designer on this project, I saw each step of the redesign process through from start to completion. I also presented deliverables to the client at each phase of the project, including lo-fi wireframes, multiple homepage options, style sheets, and hi-fi wireframes. Once approved, I worked one-on-one with our web developer to get them the assets needed to build the final site.
To enhance the site, we also created and implemented a student portal, which received rave reviews from students and employees.
Work done at 25th Hour Communications
Information Architecture, Style Sheet, and Lo-Fi Prototype
This project also entailed the creation of meta majors within the college in order to provide students with a clear pathway to graduation, and help them make connections between their studies and different career tracks. We worked with BridgeValley's board of governors to establish these new academic program categories, which were rolled out at the same time as the new website, completely changing the layout of their Programs page.
Meta Majors Lo-Fi Wireframes
Old Homepage
One of the biggest improvements our team made was to the information architecture of the website. BridgeValley's original main menu on the old site took up two lines, and was close to bleeding onto a third. It was driven by internal stakeholders and department heads, ultimately muddying the user experience. Our team worked diligently to restructure the navigation in a way that was intuitive, and worked in favor of their marketing efforts towards prospective students.
Our research also showed that both students and staff felt there were too many colors on the old site, so the redesign primarily used white, black, and gray, with green accents. The new design incorporated plenty of white space to separate groups of information.
Redesigned Web Page Samples
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