The mission of Washington County Public Schools, in partnership with community members, is to educate and enable all students to fully access opportunities afforded them in a rapidly changing, diverse, global society. The central vision for the school system is to continue 'building a community that inspires curiosity, creativity, and achievement." Their marketing efforts must support the mission and vision by capturing attention and piquing interest.
Parents, students, teachers, staff, local contractors, the general public ... each visiting the WCPS website for a specific reason. How could we meet all their needs on the same website and still make it easy-to-use? By identifying key audiences and interviewing them through surveys and Facebook data, we mapped potential users with their priorities. The content was simplified into the main navigation with an audience-focused secondary menu for quick access to relevant pages, forms, and information.
For WCPS, we had a major problem: "How do we fit all of this content on one page so that people can find it?" Wireframes are essentially blueprints for a website. They allow developers, designers, and our clients to communicate easily about the "information architecture," which refers to the page layout, content, and interrelation of pages on a website. Design discussions easily become subjective about likes and dislikes, so first, we decide on the functional "information architecture." After a wireframe is approved, the designers work their magic! You can see the before/afters below.
High schools and middle schools look like they have separate microsites, but their pages are actually housed within the main WCPS website. This back-end update saves time for the school system, as they only need to update key information one time, and it will appear seamlessly across all the school web pages. This leaves time for WCPS to focus on the important thing: the students.
WCPS challenged HighRock to create a commercial that would get kid's attention, get them excited, and raise awareness for all the great career courses available. The target audience was teens and pre-teens, so we filmed this project with a 24mm to have a similar perspective to a phone camera.
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