Overview

Gogebic Community College is a public community college located in Ironwood, Michigan. The college offers two-year associate degrees, a variety of certification programs, occupational training, and other learning opportunities for the surrounding community.

Challenge

Gogebic's previous website was designed over 7 years ago and needed a major overhaul. Over time, the website grew to have so much information that users could no longer find the information they needed. Web administrators were working with an outdated CMS system and had to manually update every page that became tedious and prone to error. Gogebic decided they would switch their content management system to Modern Campus' Omni CMS to streamline the website updates. It was my role to create a stunning, modern, and easy-to-update design, and develop the code templates to be implemented into Omni CMS.

Research

With any new project it's important to research and gather data so that the project's decisions are being made objectively. My team members spent 4 weeks conducting user interviews, analyzing Google Analytics, and installed Hot Jar on the live website to gather the data. This information identified key pages and a brand-new sitemap was developed based on the data.

Results

The new design that I implemented was meant to be a conversion first solution while also offering current students an elegant and easy to use menu system. The design uses an outdoorsy theme by using rugged textures, great iconography, and amazing photography that will make any student looking for an education want to apply to Gogebic. The current students were able to get a sneak-peak of the designs that I created, and they were very excited and totally blown away by the new design. The design was then converted into 6 page templates that use barebones HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The code was then run through 3 different accessibility checkers and delivered to Modern Campus for implementation.