Cleveland Community College
Taking Cleveland Community College’s website from outdated to outstanding
The challenge
Completely redesign and modernize the outdated Cleveland Community College website, while also untangling a problematic course management system.
The Solution
A modern, user-friendly WordPress site and more efficient course management system that gracefully extended the College brand across the digital realm.
Meeting the needs of users
Cleveland Community College in Shelby, North Carolina asked Modern Tribe to update its outdated main website essentially from scratch—the site had minimal design elements and mostly text-based pages. In order to approach this modernization with users in mind, we began the project with a Discovery phase seeking to understand key College audiences and the content most important to them.
Extending the brand
As initially scoped, the project did not include a branding element. However, as we delved into the site and existing style guide during Discovery, we identified significant gaps around the digital presentation of the College brand. In response, our designers worked with the Cleveland team to evolve the project to encompass branding work, ensuring the new website would elegantly embody the College brand across digital channels.
Designing for impact
The Discovery phase also influenced how we designed WordPress content blocks to best showcase content in alignment with both Cleveland’s organizational goals and top user priorities. The result is a modern, user-friendly website seamlessly showcasing content, especially highly important information about College programs and courses.
Overhauling Smart Catalog
A major source of frustration for the Cleveland team was their third-party course management system “Smart Catalog.” Cleveland had an existing integration with Smart Catalog that was slow and error-prone, and therefore only being run once per year—any programs/classes that changed in between syncs had to be updated manually, which took significant time.
Planning, architecting, and building improvements to the WordPress Smart Catalog import was not an easy task. We held specific scoping meetings to tackle this feature, ensuring alignment across disciplines to reduce miscommunication and inefficiencies.
Ultimately, to address the challenges with the Smart Catalog WordPress import process, we implemented a queue system (action scheduler) which eliminated previous frustrations and allowed for nightly syncs, significantly improving the efficiency of Cleveland’s program and course finder. In spite of some stringent budget constraints, our team managed to successfully integrate this feature, significantly enhancing the College website.
Achieving outcomes
We’re super proud of the work we did with Cleveland Community College to create an effective digital platform empowering student educational and career success. Through a combination of thoughtful Discovery and steadfast flexibility throughout our collaboration, we launched a modern, user-oriented website, creatively extended the College brand across the digital space.