With athletic programs and on-campus housing, Lake Michigan College (LMC) offers something truly unique—a community college with some of the hallmarks of a four-year college experience. They came to us needing to improve the branding and organization of their website so that more students could find out just how valuable an LMC college experience can be. Our solution involved a refreshed design with two homepage versions, customized to their prospective and current student audiences’ needs.

Getting to Know Each Other

At Williams Randall, we study everything about a problem before we address it. When it comes to client projects, this means we get to know you, your audience, and the market you exist in well before we begin concepting. So, before getting into the thick of the creation of the new home page and site navigation, our team took a trip up to the college so we could get a better understanding of all that LMC has to offer. Our team loved seeing the state-of-the-art FabLab, where students bring creations to life, the Mendel Center for Performing Arts, and the on-campus winery.

Once we got to know LMC and their goals, we needed to get to know their primary audiences: prospective and current students. Williams Randall conducted a Google Analytics review and user interviews to inform the new site organization and homepage design. Through this research, we learned a lot of information to inform decisions during the project. A couple examples include:

1. Quantitative data showed what types of content prospective and current students were visiting on the site while qualitative data revealed what they were missing or not able to find. We organized the primary navigation and homepage content to better match these needs, as well as recommended new pages be added to the site to house missing content.
2. During interviews, users expressed confusion about various labels and academic industry language that confused them, so we changed them to more general terms in the navigation to help users find what they were looking for.

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  Prospective Student Homepage

Modernizing the Site

We focused our homepage redesign on two key areas: content organization and modernized visuals. In our review of the original website, we found that there were a few key areas that needed modernizing. One of those areas was the drop down menu, which went below the fold as too many pages had been added to it over time. This made it difficult for users to read and find what they were looking for.

We also refreshed the visual look of the site to showcase the student experience at LMC through photography and video that shows students engaging in their fields of study and in campus life activities. Additionally, we used their brand colors, fonts, and patterns more prominently to create a collegiate feel and ownable look for the college.

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  Current Student Homepage

Customization Station

LMC had very different goals for their students based on whether they were exploring the college or already enrolled. Therefore, we made two versions of the homepage to help support these unique goals and meet users' needs. In practice, this means that prospective students get a different site experience than current students and vice versa. This level of customization allowed us to position content and include CTAs for each audience despite their different needs.

Helping Connect Students to Their Futures

With a new homepage design, site organization, and sitewide header and footer, Lake Michigan College is better able to tell their brand story and drive conversions. Students can more clearly conceptualize the idea of a community college with a traditional university feel, which will ultimately help bring more students to campus. We just launched the site, but we look forward to seeing how the redesign impacts LMC's application submissions in the months to come.