SBVC reached out to us with the goal of rethinking, redesigning and redeveloping their academics portion of the website using the Guided Pathways model. What started as a focused mission turned into a facelift of the entire website.
Discovery
Before putting pen to paper, we needed to get a deeper understanding of SBVC, their audience, and their approach to Guided Pathways. At its core, Guided Pathways is designed to give students the opportunity to explore programs to make more informed choices. With this goal in mind, we conducted surveys and focus groups with key constituents and built out user personas, journeys and an information architecture.
Content
Prior to design, we identified the content needs for the website, began to collect media assets to be used on the site, and developed initial drafts of content for the top-level pages. During the Content phase, we worked with SBVC to:
- Develop drafts of content for top-level pages
- Gather visual content, both video, and photo.
- Consult on SBVC’s content development of program pages
Design
SBVC really needed a full revamp of their styles throughout the site. Since we knew the new Academics pages we'd be working on could translate to the rest of the site, we decided to take a small extra step of redesigning the global elements throughout the site. While we still maintained our focus on Academics, the entire site got a facelift.
Development
Because we were not wiping the slate clean and because of the nature of working with Omni CMS, we broke out the development and implementation of the site into two phases:
- Global Styles and Templates
- Component, Snippet and Page Building
This approach allowed us to have minimal downtime and allow users to continue to edit and keep content up to date — and we were able to rollout a facelift earlier than originally anticipated.
Omni CMS is not a database driven CMS, so we needed to take a creative approach to aggregation of all programs, degrees, certificates, divisions and career pathways. The solution we came up with was to utilize a CSV file as our database and make API calls to that CSV data source to populate, organize and filter content throughout the site.
Launch & Post Launch
Upon completion and launch, we provided SBVC with technical documentation for all new components and templates. In 2023, SBVC reached out to us to help revamp the Student Services side of the house.