About the Company
Western Community College offers accessible, affordable education and a range of academic and student development services. Their focus is on helping students achieve their goals, to become productive workers and leaders in their communities.
Objectives
- Improve brand equity and online reach through branded storytelling
- Improve site architecture and navigation to enable easier browsing and support content discovery
- Drive conversion of site visitors into contacts and, ultimately, students
- Build on SEO foundations to increase search engine traffic and drive future growth
- Implement a fully responsive solution backed by WordPress CMS
Prototyping
WCC had a huge website with a high volume of courses, and that wasn’t going to change. Like any institution, they serve potential, current, and post-graduate students, as well as government funders and academic partners.
The focus of this website redesign was on smoother navigation and a cleaner presentation of information. This was especially important to support their many international students in quickly finding details about permit-eligible programs, credit transfers, and post-graduate pathways to work in Canada. Through our sitemap and wireframe work, we strategized the best way to make all of that content easily discoverable.
Style
WCC was looking for a visual lift, leaning more into the red from their palette and going for a more minimalist aesthetic. We created designs with vivid background patterns and icons to make the pages feel more lively, without creating clutter. Their authentic photography throughout the site gives it the feeling of a spirited, exciting campus.
Bringing it All Together
The new Western Community College site is rich in content, but easy on the eyes. It gives prospective students immediate paths to learn more about programs and campuses, and everything they need to know about eligibility, applying, financing, and more. And the site is built on our low-code platform, Refoundry, so their team can easily add and remove courses, create entire new pages to support campaigns, and iterate the site’s styles and layouts as their offering grows.
Built with Refoundry
Refoundry is a low-code site builder plugin created by Forge and Smith’s owner, Shawn Johnston, and our team of engineers. We’ve been building all of our websites on it since late 2022. It empowers our clients with total creative freedom in WordPress, and the ability to more easily grow and scale their sites.
See the Finished Site
Go explore the full website, then come back to discover more of our work!
