Flying Dutchgirl Communications » Cascadia Community College

Cascadia.edu wins a prize

Cate — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:29:31 +0000

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.

Content coaching and guides for Cascadia.edu

Cate — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:00:34 +0000

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.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

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:

Three rules for writing webpages

For Cascadia Community College web content authors

1. Make it short and simple

Make it short: Avoid long paragraphs. Divide information into easy-to-grasp chunks by using h2 (and h3) subheads, short paragraphs, and bulleted lists or numbered steps.
Stick to one thing at a time: One topic per page, one point per sentence, and one idea per paragraph.

2. Put the most important information first

Use inverted-pyramid format: As in newspaper articles, start the page with the main message, and follow it with supporting content. The “fold” is where the page content meets the bottom of the screen without scrolling: Do not put any of the most important information in your topic below the fold.
Frontload headings, list items, and links with keywords: When people arrive at a webpage, they scan headings, links, lists, and captions first. By packing those items with keywords (the words that most users would use to search on your topic), you’ll help users recognize information that’s relevant to them.

3. Be polite and straightforward

Focus on value: Focus on what the site does that is valuable from the users’ point of view, as well as how Cascadia differs from other colleges. Promoting something without substance detracts from Cascadia’s image.
Use the active voice: Address the site’s users as “you.” Don’t use language like “Students must provide their Social Security number” — instead, write “Include your Social Security number.”
Use plain language: Avoid jargon and invented terminology. If you must use a technical term, tell people what it means. To make the site accessible to international audiences, avoid American idioms, slang, metaphors, analogies, and abbreviations.
Include alt text/captioning: Include descriptive alternative text for all images and captioning for all movies, to make the site fully accessible to disabled users.
No gratuitous multimedia: Use graphics, images, and movies only to support text content, provide information or instruction, or otherwise help people complete the tasks that they have come to the site to perform. Using multimedia gratuitously distracts people from the content you want them to see and the tasks they are trying to complete.

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.

Homepage design for Cascadia.edu

Cate — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:00:34 +0000

This slidecast shows part of the work I did for Cascadia. For an overview of that project, see Cascadia.edu website redesign.

Cascadia.edu website redesign

Cate — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:00:10 +0000

“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.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

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:

Homepage design for Cascadia.edu
Cascadia.edu information architecture and content migration plan
Content coaching, guides, and templates for content authors, including standards and guidelines for metadata and microcontent (for usability and search optimization)
Writing and editing for selected pages
Wireframes for web applications
Goals and audiences brief (summary of responses to a strategy questionnaire filled out during a day-long meeting with stakeholders)
Brand plan including audience definition, site priorities, and audience profiles (developed with Tauber-Kienan Associates)
Consulting on social media strategy
Expert evaluation of earlier proposed design

Targeting multiple audiences on a homepage

Cate — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:00:12 +0000

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.