CVTC Website

Background

Chippewa Valley Technical College (CVTC) is part of the Wisconsin Technical College System and serves an 11-county area. The largest campus is located in Eau Claire, with major regional campuses in Chippewa Falls, Menomonie, Neillsville, and River Falls. The College is one of 16 WTCS colleges located throughout the state. CVTC has an appointed district board consisting of nine members who serve three-year, staggered terms.

High Monkey responded to an RFP issued by CVTC to redesign their website in early 2015.

Project type: Public Website Platform: Kentico

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Goals

Chippewa Valley Technical College approached High Monkey with a need to re-build their website with many goals in mind. First, they were hoping to consolidate and optimize their existing page layouts. The CVTC team also identified a need to reconstruct the CVTC public website to improve functionality and provide a better user overall experience.

In inital meetings, the CVTC team identified the objective of search optimization, especially for course description pages, to ensure that students and professors could find the content they needed with ease. Last but not least, the CVTC website needed us to integrate branded SharePoint search within the Kentico CMS environment.

Challenges

Chippewa Valley Community College needed a fresh Install of Kentico with a cleaner more modern look and feel, and a new search implementation to improve the search-ability of their website.

One of the main issues High Monkey came across while working on this project had to deal directly with the page layouts built into Kentico. CVTC wanted their long page layouts to flow smoothly yet still deliver a user friendly experience.

Another issue that surfaced during this project dealt directly with the Search functionality. CVTC needed a search engine that provided greater control over search results.

One more challenging item that was faced during the duration of this project dealt with the CSS. The CSS that was being used on the original site needed to be set up for more efficient workability in the future.

One of the last issues that surfaced during this project was the site structure. CVTC needed pages of their site to be restructured with different web parts, optimizing the site for search results.

Services Required

Accessibility and Content Compliance

Search and Content Strategy

UX and DX Design

Website Design and Build

Solution

In order to make sure that everyone was on board and on the same page with this project, multiple meetings took place assuring that everything was laid out on the table and the deliverables of the project were clear as well as a final timeline that would be followed throughout the duration of the project.

While working with the new sites page layouts, High Monkey had to edit the built in page layouts to function in a way that made sense to the CVTC staff as well as the potential users of the new site.

When dealing with the search functionality of the new site High Monkey implemented SharePoint 2013 Search and optimized it to be used to crawl the CVTC public site and surface far more superior search results than the previous search system.

When handling the CSS for this project High Monkey knew it was important to the CVTC team as well as the future users of the site that the new site would be easy to work with as well as set-up in a way that was easy to understand.

Lastly the new CVTC public website needed to be optimized for the new search system that was being implemented! High Monkey restructured the pages for the new site with different web parts allowing content within those pages to be optimized for search.

High Monkey provided CVTC with a team of developers, a graphic designer, as well an architect, and it was completed and launched on July 28, 2015.

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