Earlham College

Higher ed web design and development

Earlham is a national liberal arts college with a reputation for excellent teaching and preparing students to make a profound positive difference in the world. Since 1874 they’ve been providing education of the highest quality while building a reputation for open, cooperative learning. In order to continue to deliver on this promise, Earlham needed to develop a website that supports their community of users and over-arching organizational goals.

RocketBuild worked closely with the Earlham team and marketing partner, Pathfinders, to engineer a modern frontend experience that utilizes content in the most impactful way and tells a great story.

Overview

Industry

Higher education

Company

Earlham College

Project

Higher education web development

Solution

Responsive website design and development

An elevated digital strategy and tailored website experience

The combined teams at Pathfinders and RocketBuild started the discovery and digital strategy planning processes at the ground level and worked towards a completely reimagined user experience for Earlham’s new website. As with any higher education web development project, the site needed to become a modern, powerful recruiting tool.

Together, we determined website goals and target audiences while conducting a content and analytics audit of the previous site. All research, discovery, and insights led to a new site architecture and wireframes that organized all content into a logical, intuitive system.

Services

UX strategy

Technical architecture

UI design

Website development

Integrations

Project stats

19

Custom WordPress modules

2

Higher ed SaaS product integrations

6

Months from discovery to launch

A flexible and scaleable content delivery system

After determining how to make the most important content easily accessible to all user types —  including current & prospective students, parents, alumni, and faculty — we moved into our design and development phases.

To engineer a scaleable, secure, and extensible site, WordPress was selected as the CMS to make updating website content easy for administrators. The design gives students a feel for the organization’s culture, mission, and focus, while helping all visitors access the information they need quickly.

Tech stack

WordPress

Amazon Web Services

Higher education web development

The website includes multiple integrations for managing event registration, admissions and enrollment, and marketing tools like social media and a newsletter sign-up system. A custom mega-menu was built to improve the user experience and overall organization of the site. The CMS allows publishers to easily create pages that fit their vision while aligning with brand standards and predetermined styling of components.

A fully responsive, mobile-friendly interface

We took a mobile-first design approach to ensure simple access to essential information on all kinds of devices. The user-centric content strategy and navigation appears engaging regardless of whether visitors are on a phone, tablet, or desktop.

A design full of custom details

The site design features animated graphics that guide the user through the site. Iconography, illustration, and photography are used to create a unique balance between storied and modern, academic and spirited, and informative and fun.

Higher education web development, RocketBuild
Higher education web development, RocketBuild

Boosting enrollment

As a distinguished institution, we spent a lot of time dedicated to understanding what makes the college so special and what would attract students to its transformative approach to education. Everything from the sitemap, content strategy, and page layouts were built with prospective students in mind.

Highlighting college happenings

The site includes a calendar of events and news feed and serves as the central hub for all happenings around campus. The robust newsroom features video and audio resources for journalists and bloggers as well a tool for finding faculty experts on campus.

Higher education web development, RocketBuild

Enhanced features and a scaleable content system that supports growth

The new Earlham.edu needed to engage students and staff across all devices. The resulting website is a highly functional responsive system that’s easy for internal teams to manage on their own to keep the site fresh and effective for years to come.

Higher education web development, RocketBuild

Find out how RocketBuild can bring your digital project to life!

When you partner with us you gain full stack capabilities without the expense of hiring and maintaining an in-house development team, all while maintaining the accountability of an on-shore team of professionals.

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