Capilanou.ca

CapU's web content was managed through an outdated Wordpress theme. Information was fragmented, duplicated, and hard to find for students.

Editors were also having difficulty maintaining accurate information and the design wasn't optimized for devices with smaller screens.

In 2017, we partnered with the university's IT and marketing teams to redesign this website.

We started by interviewing faculty and staff

It was crucial for us to hear what problems they faced and to learn how CapU's brand should be interpreted.

We wanted to get it right

Once we understood CapU's challenges, we got to work. We audited their existing website and began piecing together content models for our redesign.

I kicked off our usability research with a competitive review of other higher ed websites to understand industry best practices.

From there, I worked with our content strategist and mapped content models and user flows to rudimentary wireframes in order to show the overall layout of our redesign.

Initially, our plan was to make design mockups

CapU's web team was to use our designs to develop the site in a new content management system (CMS): Terminalfour.

This meant that our clients weren't only planning to write the responsive front-end templates, but were also developing in a new CMS environment amidst a tight timeline.

I saw an opportunity to help

I realized that the CapU team had a lot on their plate so I began coding a few of the front-end templates.

Once I demoed the designs in-browser, the decision was made: I would complete the remainder of the front-end development so that CapU's IT team could focus on learning and developing the back-end.

Front-end designs

Once I delivered completed front-end templates to the CapU web team, they were able to seamlessly connect the designs to their new content management system.

The new capilanou.ca launched in 2018 and we've been making improvements to it ever since.

Digital style guide

Along with the front-end templates, I also documented the design system in a digital style guide to ensure coherency and consistency in any future CapU projects for the web.