Eastern Wyoming College - PHOS Creative

The Challenge

Eastern Wyoming College (EWC) is a higher education institution located in Goshen County, Wyoming. As a smaller college, they offer affordable, personalized education opportunities to students. They often refer to themselves as a small institution with a big heart, able to help their students charge into their future with high-quality education resources and diverse degree options.

Their friendly and warm environment was not communicated well online. Their digital presence was outdated, complex, and unusable. They knew they needed to overhaul their website and digital identity, but they were unsure how to accomplish it.

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Our Vision

Our team was excited to partner with EWC to transform their online identity and showcase the college’s unique spirit and offerings to potential students. Additionally, we were eager to create a website that current students and faculty could easily navigate.

Trusted

For any higher education institution, showcasing expertise and unique value was important. We needed to make sure that EWC was memorable and distinct in the minds of prospective students.

Functional

Having a website that anyone could easily navigate and use was essential for all user groups, including potential students, current students, faculty, and staff.

Welcoming

EWC needed to share their professionalism as an institution but also wanted to showcase their heart for their students. We wanted to create a welcoming experience that invited each user into EWC’s family.

The Solution

Our strategy for a comprehensive digital experience was focused on the following goals:

Attract first-time and returning users.
Tell the unique story of EWC and position them as a place where students will be welcomed, encouraged, and served.
Provide information, resources, and opportunities to engage with EWC.
Direct and encourage users to take action.

We knew we needed to appeal to two different user groups: potential students and current students/faculty. The website needed to be attractive, functional, informational, and accessible.

Brand Strategy

Before we could begin thinking through the website design, we first needed to uncover the visual and verbal identity of EWC. Working through our brand attribute activity, EWC identified the following characteristics that they wanted their brand to emulate:

Trusted (Reliable, Professional, Helpful, Credible)
Welcoming (Sincere, Approachable, Fun, Warm)
Inspiring (Dynamic, Vibrant, Innovative, Open-Minded)
Traditional (Practical, Scholarly, Affordable)

From there, we crafted a moodboard that leveraged EWC’s current brand elements, their emphasis on brand attributes, and some updated touches.

Our design team used their brand colors of yellow and black while adding warm tones of orange and cream. This helped evoke a welcoming atmosphere while staying true to EWC’s identity. Incorporating elements like dashed lines resembling a lasso and a sepia-style photo treatment established a sense of roots, history, and tradition. The choice of fonts balanced casual and welcoming vibes with professionalism, with a subtle hint of Western flair.

Website Design & Development

With a visual and verbal direction in place, we could begin planning the website architecture and design.

Sitemap Development

Education websites are historically large, requiring hundreds of pages to include information on everything from course offerings to housing options. Not only did we need to create a website hierarchy that made all important information accessible, but we also needed to craft a strategy to migrate content from the current bloated website.

Having a comprehensive sitemap ensured that the website design and navigation was well informed for every user type. This also helped our team make strategic decisions about what content needed to be migrated from the current website to the new one.

Our sitemap set our path for the most critical pages and content categories. From there, we could identify the correct parent, children, and orphan pages, ensuring every page was linked and housed appropriately.

Content Strategy

With our sitemap as our guide, we developed a robust content strategy that directed our team to identify the most important pages to live on the website. We were tasked with paring down 3,000+ pages to under 100 for the new site. This was only possible because of our sitemap and user goal strategy.

Our content strategy was directed by the following key categories:

About EWC
Academics
Admissions & Financial Aid
Student Resources
Athletics
Our Family

It’s no surprise that these are the main categories on the menu of the website. Only the most important content needed to be migrated and associated with these broad categories that every educational institution leverages.

Website Navigation

If everything is important, then nothing is important. For many educational institutions, it can be hard to pinpoint the most important pages if you feel like all pages are equally important.

Our sitemap helped protect our hierarchy and content flow, which then translated into the intentional use of the website’s main navigation. Using the top categories as mentioned above, we were able to leverage a functional navigation menu with an additional masthead above it.

We had our most important links readily available and sub-menus for further information. This made sure the menu was clean, concise, and user-friendly.

Program Spotlights

EWC has a variety of specific, unique degrees and programs like welding, gunsmithing, veterinary, and cosmetology. These programs are highly desirable, so making it simple to find and easy to learn more was critical.

Under Academics, we hosted all the available programs that a student could enroll in at EWC.

Within each program page, all the required information, like overview, application links, certification offerings, and faculty information, were included. This ensured that all questions were answered before a student even needed to contact EWC.

Student Resources

A college website is a critical component of a potential student’s consideration for choosing a school, but it’s also a tool for current students to leverage during their time. We needed to create intentional touchpoints throughout the site to highlight news and information to protect the engagement of EWC’s student body.

Photography

EWC’s campus is so beautiful and welcoming that we knew a potential student would be convinced of the friendly atmosphere if they stepped on campus. However, much of the potential student’s research will be influenced by what they see online.

When EWC came to us, their photography was lacking, and having the right images was critical to show the sense of community and belonging that the school wanted to be known for.

Our team knew that we needed to showcase EWC’s campus, student body, faculty, and unique degree programs on the website. We had the privilege of visiting EWC’s campus to capture these shots.

These photos captured the heart and spirit of EWC. We were honored that select images were awarded a Silver ADDY Award in the 2023 AAF District Addy Awards.

Videography

Like photography, video would bolster EWC’s ability to communicate the feel of their school through captivating visuals. The Brand Anchor video we produced did just that.

This video was also leveraged in the B-roll on the homepage to elevate the brand and communicate trust right from the very first visit. Videography also helped showcase the variety of offerings at EWC and highlight what makes them unique.

Inbound Marketing

After the new website launched, we were able to partner with EWC once more. This time it was to launch a multi-email campaign to follow up with students interested in EWC that met them at the 2023 National FFA Convention.

We first developed a landing page that collected student information connected to a QR code that EWC had displayed at their booth at the convention. If interested, a student would submit a form to stay connected with EWC after the convention concluded. From this convention, we had over 500 students submit their interest.

Working with the EWC team, we developed 6 emails to nurture these interested students, from grades 8–12th, with key information to convince them to apply.

These emails highlighted EWC’s campus, program offerings, financial aid information, and housing options. We sent these emails starting one week after the convention to keep the momentum going.

With this being EWC’s first email drip campaign, we were extremely pleased with the results. The emails had a higher than industry average open rate of 40%. Out of the over 500 students who were sent emails, only 10 unsubscribed. We also discovered that EWC’s degree options and financial aid information were the most engaged content.

The Impact

The new website and supporting marketing materials established EWC as a trusted institution and a great option for students interested in specific programs or a down-to-earth community feel from their college.

Their digital presence has made them competitive against other smaller colleges in their region, as well as a trusted option for many looking for a career change or continued professional development.

Because their main priority was to create an engaging, easy-to-use website for prospective and current students, we’ve highlighted the following metrics:

Event count per user: An event in analytics is counted anytime a user engages with the site in a meaningful way, such as clicking to another page, scrolling through the entire page, clicking a form, etc. When comparing EWC’s event count per user since its launch to the period before its launch, the event count per user has improved by 24%.
Engaged sessions per user: Like event count per user, engaged sessions are an objective indicator of user experience. An “engaged” user is someone who spends a pre-set amount of time looking at the site. Typically, if a user spends more than 10 seconds on a website, it means they are finding the information helpful. Engaged sessions per user increased by 22%.
Average engagement time: Because educational institutions’ websites contain so much content, they tend to have a higher engagement time than many other industries. Since the launch of the website, EWC’s average engagement time improved by 41%.