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Grand View University CMSUXWeb Design

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Creating a Website for Grand View University That’s Ahead of the Curve

Founded more than 100 years ago in 1896, Grand View University offers a high-quality education to a diverse student body through a career-oriented, liberal arts-grounded curriculum in Des Moines, Iowa. They offer bachelor's and master's degrees and welcome traditional students and adult learners representing a wide range of religious and cultural backgrounds.

With such a broad range of offerings, Grand View University needed website design that helped them organize all their information in a way that would engage both current and prospective students. They trusted Blue Compass’ user experience (UX) research to guide them through a new user-friendly website design for their school that now provides essential information and encourages interaction from website users. Our impressive custom web design and development services gave them tools that helped their website graduate to the next level.

A Grand View events calendar image on a mobile device.

An A+ Event System With Custom Development Services

College life isn’t just about what’s going on in the classroom — the events and activities offered to students can have a big impact on their experience. Grand View needed a robust event system to complete their website design for a higher education facility. Their busy calendar included events for all types of students, campus visit days and more.

Our web development team created a custom event system to accommodate Grand View’s fast-paced and ever-changing environment. Creating a new event is as simple as filling out a form with the dates and other essential information. It then populates a summary on the homepage, letting users click to learn more. Grand View University was thrilled to have this incorporated on their new website as it made event management much easier for their team.

Content Architecture & UX

One of the main focuses for Grand View’s website was a revamped content architecture. Grand View University shares a vast amount of information to a broad range of audiences, from students looking for class details to donors looking for the latest updates. Our web designers created several robust templates for the Grand View team to use, allowing users to easily find what they're looking for. The dual navigation on Grand View’s website allows them to display all the important avenues of their organization providing a positive user experience without looking too cluttered.

Website Design & Development

There’s a lot happening around Grand View’s campus that needed to be featured on the new website. Academic materials, campus visits, University news, sporting events, alumni and donation information — the website needed to convey all of this in a way that wouldn’t overwhelm users while providing them a path to what they’re looking for. Our custom web design and development experts dove into the assignment and found creative ways to display the various aspects of student life all while utilizing strategic call-to-action opportunities that encouraged users to reach out.

Content Management System

Since it takes a village of Vikings to keep Grand View University’s website and online presence up-to-date, they use Slate, a customizable content management system (CMS). Within the CMS, a donation system lets Grand View accept and track donation payments directly on the back-end of their website — they previously outsourced this to a third-party and were happy to bring this important aspect of their website in-house. Their team loves how intuitive the user-friendly CMS is and how it gives them the flexibility to easily manage necessary changes and push out live updates.

SEO

Our team cleaned up SEO errors on the previous website and implemented optimized content on the new website. Additional tactics such as, such as schema code additions, structured data and pillar pieces were also implemented. The updates helped Grand View to rank higher in search results for a number of keywords and gain additional organic users.

We are thrilled with the results and are getting heaps of compliments from faculty, staff and students. The launch went so smoothly and we really appreciate the attention to detail and thorough process you went through to make sure everything was working properly. The staff at Blue Compass was responsive, creative and helpful every step of the way. Thank you for making Grand View look so good - we couldn't have done it without you! — Kendall Dillon, VP of Marketing & Communication

A Digital Agency Always Learning & Pushing Boundaries

Our creative agency loves educating our clients about strategic online solutions and enhancing our own skills with new challenges and opportunities. It was a pleasure working with Grand View University’s team, and they appreciated our custom web design and development services. Together we produced a website design for the school loved by a diverse group of faculty, students and administrators. When you put our work to the test, Blue Compass will school the competition!

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