Elevating Their Students & Elevating ThemselveS
Graceland University, an Iowa-based University focused on community and student belonging, approached my team for support to re-envision their website — renovations were needed to boost their presence online and compete with the ever-changing way users consume information in a post-pandemic world.
Our goal? To create a user-friendly online experience that more accurately reflects Graceland’s academic story and the programs they offer, while increasing traffic, increasing the number of applications, and positioning the University at a more elevated level.
For the People
People were a part of every step of our process, from our robust virtual discovery session to student surveys, and from deep target audience studies to direct client collaboration — no people, no University. No University, no website.
The Process
Our team of designers and developers focused on cleaning up the design, organizing the information architecture, making information easy to find, and migrating content from CampusSuite CMS to WordPress CMS.
It was my job to focus on content. What was each page telling us? Do future students have enough information on program pages to understand what they are signing up for? Are the pages tracking for keywords and showing up in searches?
Together with our digital strategist, I implemented content adjustments, re-write meta details, wrote new program callouts and added highly trafficked keywords to the majority of the program pages and graduate pages on the site. I directly implemented these changes into WordPress to make the process easier for our dev team.
the result
The traffic is now of overall better quality, with users spending more time on each page and engaging more with content. Hundreds of pages later, Graceland's new website is healthier and more functional than ever, the results speak for themselves:
72% Decreased YoY Bounce Rate
25% Increased Average Session Duration
2 Min Increase in Average Time Spent on the Application Page
50% Page Load Time Decrease
25% Increased Average Session Duration
2 Min Increase in Average Time Spent on the Application Page
50% Page Load Time Decrease
