Key elements of any higher ed website redesign project include:
- Website strategy
- Information architecture
- Content strategy
- Responsive design
mStoner has reimagined hundreds of websites with schools, colleges, and universities of all sizes, and we’re the first to admit that there’s no single, magic solution. Tackling a project like this one requires hard work.
If you’re ready to start planning a redesign at your institution, I suggest downloading our recently published white paper. We offer thoughts about how to approach key decisions and make the best choices for your project and your institution.
You might also want to explore this collection of five of our past webinars, which I hope will inspire your redesign project. And if you want to talk about partnering with our team for your upcoming project, just shoot us an email.
Inspired by the Cheshire Cat: Strategy Leads to Success
Successful education websites, social media channels, and print collateral ground themselves in the realities of your institution’s brand platform and communication strategy. Just doing “some stuff” won’t help you hit your target. To be successful, you need a strategy — and yes, your plan must include goals. Susan T. Evans, mStoner’s senior director for strategy, leads this important presentation.
This webinar will provide reasons to believe in strategy! We’ll also address:
- What strategy is and how to get started.
- Why strategy helps you meet your goals.
- How to get the support of your campus leadership.
Information Architecture: The Journey, the Destination, and the Return Trip
“Our site needs to be easier to use.”
“I just want to be able to get to the things that are most important to me.”
Sound familiar?
These statements highlight just some of the common problems related to a higher ed website’s information architecture (IA). The way you organize, label, sequence, and group elements on your site — from the smallest files and paragraphs to pages and entire microsites — is managed through information architecture. The better your site IA, the easier it is for visitors to find information and engage with your institution. Fran Zablocki, mStoner’s strategist, leads this session.
This webinar will help you gain a comprehensive understanding of information architecture best practices in higher education. In addition, we answer questions that cover a range of topics, including user behavior, labeling, user experience, training, governance, top-down IA, bottom-up IA, and staff and professional development.
What’s Your Strategy For Content Strategy?
Kristina Halvorson tells us that content strategy is “a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process for a website development project.”
But then what? What’s your strategy for content strategy when your higher ed website includes thousands upon thousands of pages? Oh, and you’re a web team of one, or maybe two, or at the most three. What can you take away from the practice of content strategy that is realistic and doable? And how can you explain what all this means to your campus? Susan T. Evans discusses a practical beginning for your content strategy in this webinar.
From Guesswork to Gestalt: Designing for the Brain
You don’t need to know your way around Photoshop to benefit from this webinar. Sarah Eva Monroe, mStoner’s senior creative director, will lead you through the theories of visual perception that will help optimize your design eye. You’ll learn about concepts such as similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground relationships, and symmetry. Knowing how these principles contribute to a successful design will help you both create better design work and give more helpful feedback.
As a result of this webinar series, you’ll be able to:
- Assess a design deliverable to understand how well it follows gestalt design principles.
- Provide constructive feedback in order to support a cleaner, more organized content presentation and, therefore, a better user experience (UX) in the final product.
- Suggest potential design solutions instead of just pointing out things that don’t feel quite right.
- Understand how responsive design has complicated the interactive designer’s application of these principles.
- Learn when to bend the rules for the greater good of the project.
Simplicity and Speed: Design and Usability for Multi-Device Websites
Welcome to the age of sequential and simultaneous browsing. According to Google, 90 percent of consumers now use multiple screens to accomplish tasks on the web. Tablets and mobile remain hot topics for sales, use, and design. In an age when most users are accessing sites with multiple devices, top companies are focusing on fast and clean delivery of information.
This webinar, led by mStoner’s strategist, Doug Gapinski, will focus on how new realities are changing web design, web design process, and usability standards.
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