The Cascadia Community College website won a bronze award at the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations District 7 conference in October. The NCMPR is an association for marketing and PR professionals at community and technical colleges.
Read more about my work on the Cascadia.edu website redesign.
Client: Cascadia Community College
(This page shows one part of the work I did for Cascadia. For an overview of that project, see Cascadia.edu website redesign.)
Challenges: Help Cascadia develop usable, professional-looking web content for a website redesign, and leave the marketing department with tools for maintaining the college’s voice and the content’s usability over time.
After designing a modular, flexible site architecture for Cascadia.edu, I delivered content templates, guidelines, and standards and tutored content authors (administrators from departments across the college) in applying the guidelines and standards to their content.
The guidelines included special instructions for updating the homepage, calendar items, news items, promotions, and images. In the style guide, I included both editorial style standards and a 1-page cheat sheet of basic web writing guidelines.
» Cascadia style guide contents (PDF)
» Basic web writing guidelines included in the Cascadia style guide — see next:
For Cascadia Community College web content authors
… or to discuss your project, contact us.
This slidecast shows part of the work I did for Cascadia. For an overview of that project, see Cascadia.edu website redesign.
“Thank you for all you have done during this project! Your knowledge and skills, your patience and persistence, your continual search for information about effective sites, and on and on… We’ve learned a lot from you and have appreciated your commitment to quality.” —Linda Hendrickson, Cascadia Community College
Client: Cascadia Community College is a feeder school for the University of Washington. It shares its state-of-the-art, wetland-lined campus with UW Bothell. The magazine Washington Monthly named Cascadia the No. 2 community college 
in the United States.
Challenges: Cascadia’s old website got little traffic because users found it hard to find what they needed, even if the information did exist on the site. The site did not communicate the college’s strengths or provide much information that prospective college students commonly look for. The site was both out-of-date and hard to update.
To plan and create Cascadia’s new website, I worked with Cascadia’s marketing and communications department and dozens of members of college staff and administration, providing these deliverables:
I’ve been looking at a lot of college websites while I’ve been working on a redesign for Cascadia Community College. Since a community college provides a lower level of education, you might think its website would be simpler. But no-o-o-o.
Community colleges have more audiences than 4-year colleges: not just college students but students who will go on to 4-year colleges and students who won’t; people who want PowerPoint classes and yoga classes; businesses that want employee training; ESL students; people who want a high school diploma; etc. Working on the Cascadia website, we found this beautiful site we all wanted to emulate, for Santa Clara University, but it just wouldn’t have worked for us. The homepage does a great job of blasting messages at one particular audience — see the main area with the message and gorgeous photo (on the live site, both change every few seconds):
Santa Clara University homepage
Live page at:
www.scu.edu
The homepage provides all the categories of information that this audience needs — see the discreet little columns of links below the photo.
But you couldn’t use a layout like this to communicate with college students at the same time you were trying to reach business owners and people who want to learn ballroom dancing.
For an example of a homepage that targets multiple audiences, see Homepage design for Cascadia.edu.