UW Madison School of Business

Building a Higher Education Site that Converts.

Project Brief.

Higher education has become a hyper competitive space. And key in the fight for new students and brand awareness is a school's website. After conducting a thorough site audit, UW Madison's School of Business realized their site wasn't converting at the levels they needed. Additionally, broken links were scattered across pages. And the look and feel were inconsistent throughout. Both were taking away from the brand image.

The answer: a full rebuild was needed.

University of Wisconsin School of Business logo mockup

Client Details.

Services Provided.

  • Strategic Planning
  • Experience Design
  • Application Development

Project Solution.

An outdated representation of the School of Business' branding was one of the primary drivers for the new website. Not only was the brand inconsistently implemented across the site, it was also not reflective of the direction the school's marketing team was moving towards. 

The School of Business lead new creative development internally. Ascedia's role in the creative process was to bring our development expertise to the table and callout areas of concern with usability, as well as discuss possbile complexities that could push limits of scope and/or budget.

The ultimate goal was to align on web creative that was reflective of the new brand but also elevate the content experience for the user. 
By building custom blocks, the UW team is able contruct page layouts in a way that compliment the content being created for the end user. One a team with multiple developers and website contributors, it was important to provide these structured building blocks to maintain design consistency and functionality across the entire site. 

We created roughly 10 custom post types to support more integrated content throughout the site, as well as create more defined listing capabilites for content types with massive data sets to display. Some of these custom posts types included News, Events, Student Spotlights, Alumi Magazine, FAQ, Educational Centers and more. 
Throughout development and post launch, page speed tests and accessibility testing were performed to ensure the site was fast and users were able to navigate the site by using non-conventional methords, like a keyboard and screen readers. 

Project Outcomes.

Following a usability study (with a custom panel of prospective students), we know the website is having a positive impact on brand impressions and program consideration. Additionally, the new site is receiving considerably more traffic than before.

0 %

Of respondents are more likely to consider UW after viewing the main progrma page

0 %

Increase in traffic from new users

0 %

Increase in organic traffic to the undergraduate program