Case Study
Santa Fe College
Santa Fe College is a state college located in Gainesville, Florida. With this project I was replacing an existing html template based website with a custom PHP and MySQL Flat-file Content Management System. This method was chosen to allow the use of WYSIWYG editors that the current content managers were already trained on. The purpose of the Santa Fe College website was to educate students, empower users to easily find what they were looking for and to improve the homepage to application user flow.
Objectives
- Improve conversion of visitors to Applicants.
- Allow content managers to use their existing knowledge of WYSIWYG editors such as Dreamweaver to edit page content.
- Associate content managers and department heads with websites in the database.
- Allow for easy deployment of a new department websites.
- Improve navigation and information hierarchy.
- Allow college marketing objectives to inform which content is displayed on the homepage and within the navigation.
Development
- Information architecture was planned by meeting with stakeholders.
- User interviews were conducted to evaluate the user experience while trying to apply to become a student at the college.
- Designed a low fidelity wire frame in basic HTML and CSS.
- Designed the high fidelity mockup in Photoshop.
- Developed the database in MySQL.
- Created an administrator interface to create, update and delete department sites.
- Developed the template using PHP, JQuery, HTML and CSS.
Results
Santa Fe College was better able to communicate their high level messages via the front page using the new design. Users were provided with an improved navigation experience and were able to quickly find what they need in an intuitive way. Applications to the college increased and could our analytics indicated that navigation improvements were at least partly the reason for the increase.
