Strategy
We conducted extensive stakeholder interviews with members of the community, including teaching faculty, students, advocacy groups, admissions team, community education, and college administration.
Our team reviewed site analytics, comparing traffic to similar institutions. We crafted a content strategy for the redesign, making recommendations on key landing pages, conducting an inventory of existing content, and defining important content types and features moving forward.
Primary goals included supporting the existing student body with a stronger sense of community, implementing new and stronger branding, and working to declutter site navigation and page content.
Planning for Migration
We began by cataloging and analyzing over a dozen existing websites and applications in use, and strategizing on how to best transition content and features to the new site. The primary website was built in Sitecore, and we began to map how we could migrate key functionality into a new content management system (Drupal).
Design and Branding
At the same time as we were working on the site migration and redesign, MCTC was working with another agency on an extensive rebranding project.
Coming out of that effort was a new name (Minneapolis College) and logo. The branding agency provided a wonderful new logo and branding guidelines, but it fell to our team to interpret the new brand into a website.
Building off print samples, we designed and introduced some shapes and swooshes into the new website redesign, incorporated the new palette of secondary colors, fonts and image styles.
Translating a brand from the printed page to a website isn't always intuitive, but we pushed to capture the spirit of the redesign in a flexible medium such as the Internet.
