A site flow diagram focusing on the daily usage of a current parent.
Scope
Website | Design Guide | Digital Templates | Direct Mail | Adwords | Brochure Design | Staff Training
Overview
Aspen Academy is a Charter School serving grades K-8 in Savage. They had been open for 8 years at the time of this project. Between staff turn-around and an all-hands-on-deck approach, their website had become a mess of outdated, conflicting content and broken links with no apparent organization.The primary goal was to rebuild the site, organize the content, and market their school to fill the expanding building.
Target Audience
This site had 3 target users: current parents, prospective parents, and community members.
Current parents may visit daily for time-sensitive information, but they also needed policy information, lunch menus, board agendas, and teacher contacts easily accessible.
Prospective parents and community members are concerned with learning more about the school, its mission, and its accreditation. Common feedback collected from prospective parents after touring showed a major disconnect between Aspen Academy and the community:
"I didn't know that Aspen was tuition-free"
"I thought this was just an Elementary School"
"Does my child need good grades to get in?"
"I want my child to participate in athletics and after-school activities, therefore Aspen isn't for us"
A survey was given to community members to research the perception of Aspen Academy. From the results, it was shown that several policies of the school were incorrectly understood. I organized content addressing each of these areas to be used on the website, as well as a mailer and brochure for marketing materials.
Goals
Requirements
Aspen Academy employs a full staff of teachers which all need access to edit the site and maintain their own individual or grade-specific classroom pages. Provided to me was an approved home page layout and wireframe to use as a starting point.
User Experience
Site flow was considered for each target user in the different circumstances they would be visiting the site.
Shown is a sample site flow of a current parent, focusing on the information they would be seeking daily or often. The Parents page was designed to include most of the policy information in a single page, utilizing anchors to jump to the desired content from a grid of topics. The top row of the grid links outside of that single page, to the four most common pages that current parents would visit daily: News (Blog), Staff, Calendar and Lunch Menus. Each of these four areas needed their own individual page for either ease of accessibility to the other target users or so they could be bookmarked for direct access.
The analysis of target users also impacted individual page design. For example, the blog content planned to include marketing-driven posts as well as time sensitive announcements, however current parents want to access announcements quickly and easily. The posts page layout (shown) encourages current parents to visit the News page often by emphasizing the most recent Announcement posts at the very top. Below that, the posts are summarized, each with a link to read more if desired.
Design
Due to the numerous staff that would be editing this site, I was very concerned with consistency over time. A style guide, complete with tutorials, was created to set rules for the Aspen Academy employees for editing and creating new pages. I analyzed the elements of each existing classroom page, each previously designed by that teacher or grade, and identified a set of standard elements used. With those elements, I created a Classroom page template for every teacher to use moving forward. I also conducted a Training seminar for staff to teach the basics of WordPress specific to their site design.