Meet the client:
The CareerSmart Schools platform provides a comprehensive set of resources, including career information resources, lesson plans, activity plans, and how-to guides that serve as tools for every educator, school counselor, and administrator. The platform offers student videos, infographics, and downloadable documents to build understanding about the need for and value of Career Connected Learning. With CareerSmart Schools, every educator, school counselor, and administrator can access resources to make them feel more confident in delivering career-related support.
Need:
The client had an existing system where educators, school counselors, and administrators could access easy-to-use resources to help them implement career-related classroom lessons and schoolwide activities. However, the client wanted to go a step further and offer educators an easy system wherein they can read all the materials online instead of downloading massive data. Also, the client wanted to redesign their content flow, breaking down the long PDF documents and reorganizing it thoroughly to make it simple for readers to go through the content and read it. A third goal we discussed was the importance of designing a platform to be an impactful platform that would leave potential clients with a positive impression of their firm.
Solution:
To provide CareerSmart Schools with a focused and attractive platform, we spent time with their team defining key goals and action items for the new solution. Our development was excited to solve CareerSmart Schools’ digital presence challenge. We’re confident we could leverage our experience to create an intelligent platform for CareerSmart that will help them achieve their long-term goals. Here are some of the features we designed for the client.
We selected the CMS solution because we felt it would give our clients the most customization capabilities to create the backend experience they needed for their team and handle essential security considerations to fulfill IT requirements. We migrated the entire website content from their existing backend while also completing Google Analytics and SEO migrations in tandem to ensure all tracking and link equity was intact when the new site launched. Here are some of the features we designed for the client:
- Content Redesigned: Our UX team and the content team broke down the content and designed a modern flow incorporating bullet points, tabs, accordions, etc., to facilitate easy reading.
- CMS: We decided on a custom CMS system to facilitate a platform where CareerSmart Schools can update learning resources easily.
- Custom Editor: Our team designed a custom editor that will make it easier for the CareerSmart Schools’ team to create categories, resource pages and design new content using drag and drop elements such as a headline, accordion, table, or paragraph. Using the custom editor, the CareerSmart Schools team can quickly populate and publish the content. Custom Software Lab developed standardized content widgets in the CMS backend for every page template, so content loads faster and does not require a developer.
- Updated design: We reimagined the design around the resource content and presented the content in an interesting manner that could pique the interest of educators.
Result:
CareerSmart Schools found that the new website made their content and marketing efforts significantly more streamlined and efficient. The entire backend team can now edit pages and no longer need to lean on their development team each time they want to introduce new learning material or a new page for the site. This also shortened their content development to publishing time as it did not need our team to create new page templates – their in-house team could do it all. Also, the old clients of CareerSmart Schools who had the PDF resources upgraded to the new system – helped to build and maintain strong client relationships.
Do you need help migrating your data to a CMS-driven solution? Reach out to our team, and we will help you grow your business and your website.
