The Client
Guilford College is a small liberal arts college in Greensboro, North Carolina. Guilford has both traditional students and students who attend its Center for Continuing Education.
The Situation
The main goal of Guilford’s website redesign was to reimagine the college’s online presence from top to bottom. Guilford College wanted to effectively engage visitors and tell the Guilford story in a powerfully authentic, compelling and dynamic way. It’s mission was to not only make the website easier for prospective students to navigate, but to make campus and alumni constituencies eager to return on a regular basis to see what new article, photo gallery or video there is to experience.
The Challenge
Research conducted with users of Guilford.edu and Guilford College stakeholders indicated three key areas of improvement for the college’s new enrollment-focused website: reflecting the culture of the school; meeting the information needs of prospective students and their families; and enabling faculty and staff to add and update content.
Overall, the Guilford College website was not generating nearly enough traffic from prospective students, and visitors were unable to find the information they need to make an informed college decision.
The Solution
In partnership with Spark451, Guilford College conducted a major survey to gather and collect feedback from current students, prospective students, faculty and staff, alumni and parents to determine the scope of the web redesign project. From there, a web redesign oversight group was assembled to shape the foundational components of the web renovation project, from information architecture and wireframes to creative design.
Having the Acquia's on-boarding team also helped alleviate any potential Drupal blockers that could drag out the timeline. The Acquia Platform has provided the best support and training model for Guilford College to continue advancing the website beyond the initial website redesign. It’s allowing Guilford’s web developer to conquer the steep learning curve of Drupal 8, making learning the new version rather easy. Also advantageous to the web team is the ability to work in a development and testing environment to show a proof of concept and debug or test new modules or code to deliver new functionalities or features to the website.
The Results
The Guilford College website now offers a modern site that is responsive to all devices and platform. The enhanced user experience is easy to navigate to offer an engaging experience to site visitors. Finally, with Drupal 8, Guilford is supported by one of the most secure and flexible content management systems.