The Client
Established in 1769, Dartmouth College is an Ivy League research university located in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The Situation
Dartmouth’s web team knew it was essential to ensure users' voices were heard — not just through a feedback form on a beta site, but via an intentional consultative process that incorporated input from faculty, staff, students and alumni. The web team realized that by creating a design that focused on highlighting the welcoming, inclusive, close-knit community at Dartmouth, they would be able to elevate the school’s digital presence.
The Challenge
As much as the Dartmouth site was meant to be community-driven — emphasizing the incredible sense of place and the variety of opportunities available at the Ivy League institution — it was still imperative that it was also concise. Specifically, the new site’s homepage needed to be straightforward and easy to navigate.
The Solution
Working with digital partner Third and Grove, the teams began to build out the story of the Dartmouth experience, focusing their efforts on reaching target personas and providing thoughtful content organization, clear navigation, clearly defined user paths and helpful directory information. Together, they performed a site audit and digital strategy exploration, identifying and defining each homepage persona and ultimately storytelling the personalized Dartmouth experience in a first-in-class website. The audit also revealed the need to migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, for more feature options. Acquia Cloud Platform proved to be a reliable, secure and scalable solution for this project.
The Results
The Dartmouth story now leaps off the homepage, exciting prospective students. The new design highlights Dartmouth’s welcoming, inclusive, close-knit community and elevates its digital presence. Users are empowered and represented, and site navigation is effortless, with clear paths defined.