Arcadia University
Performance, UX & visual upgrades create a strong brand narrative for a top PA private university
OVERVIEW
Arcadia is a top-ranked private university in Greater Philadelphia committed to advancing their reputation and recognition on a global scale, so we helped optimize their website — their “#1 public-facing marketing tool.”
Arcadia by the Numbers
PAIN POINTS & CHALLENGES
The client team needed help amplifying not only the benefits of the liberal arts experience, but also Arcadia’s unique value propositions and robust collection of majors & minors.
Their legacy site was built in Drupal 7, which was on the verge of deprecation. After identifying WordPress as a better fit for their needs, we needed to perform a successful migration without losing traffic, trust, authority, or rankings.
The web design framework we created had to support a variety of individual departments & university subsites.
Throughout a complete redesign and follow-on iterative improvements, we needed to focus on creating the best experiences for a wide array of transitional stakeholders, internal site editors & external audiences.
SOLUTIONS: STRATEGY MEETS CREATIVITY
Planning & Discovery
After extensive audience research, competitor analysis, and usability testing, we aligned with Arcadia’s large stakeholder group on how to optimize user journeys for their primary audience groups — prospective undergrad and grad students and parents — as well as alumni, donors, faculty & staff.
UX & Visual Design
The client wanted to leverage personalized user experiences to increase their funnel of qualified applicants, donors, and funding opportunities. Aligning with their internal team on the university’s recently updated brand guidelines, we created intuitive pathways through the site with one overarching goal: leading users on compelling journeys that motivate them to take action.
Introducing role-based navigation allows users to self-select their identity to find relevant content throughout the site — with the goal of arriving at their destination in 3 clicks or less.
To make site editing extremely flexible, we opened up the WordPress CMS to provide an extremely wide range of Gutenberg blocks that can be used to create a variety of page layout combinations featuring text, images, videos, social media activity, and other meaningful visual content.
To help the client balance their site performance goals with their desire for a very visual site, we advised on how and when to use imagery — and when not to — and leveraged compressed WebP image formats, script tags, and lazy loading to improve site speed.
Thoughtful touches like layered images with subtle screened background graphic treatments add visual interest and fun pops of color.
Content Strategy
To demonstrate to global audiences the value of an Arcadia education, we made their brand narrative the heart of the university website. Highlights include:
Placing personal student, faculty, and staff stories, as well as institutional news, articles, and announcements front and center on home and landing pages
Making Program pages engaging and easy to digest to encourage users to spend time engaging with content; learning about related minors, career opportunities, and professional experiences; and taking vital actions like “Apply Now” or “Request Information”
Revamping the look and feel of news and blog articles to align with overall site design and industry trends — and feed into subsites as required
Highlighting a personalized approach to academics by faculty who love to teach via applied integrative learning opportunities
Incorporating a new centralized post type for faculty/staff bios that allows them to be associated with related content
Highlighting the university’s global awareness — through both international learning as well as its venerable College of Global Studies — as well as its social impact
We continue to support Arcadia’s internal web management team in fielding technical questions, fixing bugs & performance issues, making WordPress core & plugin updates, optimizing uptime & more.
