Gordon Website

As part of an overall brand refresh, I led a redesign of Gordon College's website, starting with the homepage and a brand new way for prospective students to discover academic programs that matched their interests.

Our goals were to transform the college web presence from an info-dense dashboard to a highly-engaging and consistent experience that speaks directly to our students' aspirations. This included immersive use of video, a streamlined navigation with strategic use of CTAs, and a new way for students to discover academic programs by either searching or browsing thematic groupings.

We made a decision to buck the trend of most higher-ed websites and minimize the amount of navigation seen at once on the screen.

Rather than overwhelming our users with every possible direction they could explore, we wanted to direct visitor's attention to discover a major or take an admissions action (seasonally swaps between Visit Campus and Apply).

Finding the right balance of streamlined navigation vs fast discovery of deeper content involved a lot of prototype iteration as well as focus-group testing. In the end, the navigation seen on initial load includes our major call-to-actions, 3 strategically chosen "escape hatches" for alternate audiences, and an easy-to-find search and slideout menu toggle. Opening the menu provides instant access to site search as well as a detailed site navigation.

Homepage visitor flow:

A major feature of the new site design is the academic discovery tool.

An oversized search field allows visitors to search programs by name, interest, or career. As the user types, instant matches appear in a dropdown window. For those more inclined to browse, we replaced our massive, 3 column list of programs with 9 thematically grouped tiles that lead to newly developed landing pages for popular program groupings.

Full homepage design:

School Landing Pages

Recently, the college structure expanded to encompass a set of Schools, which all of the majors and minors now fall within. I designed a consistent set of landing pages within the site to market their distinctives.

Second Level Landing Pages