I’ve found that content strategy is a difficult concept to demonstrate in portfolio form, so I’ve written up some case studies of past projects I’ve worked on. They demonstrate various levels of content strategy from creative content leading up to an event/product release to the layout of a major organization’s website. Check out some of the scenarios below.
Florida Legislature passed regulation requiring all 3 USF universities (Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota-Manatee) to become one university with 3 campuses. I was tasked with the moving the two separate university sites into one site’s content management system. This was a project that took a year of planning as it required design, user experience, and new content planning.
The most obvious place to start with a project of this scale is studying precedent. There is almost always somebody before you that has done it well, and you can learn from those people. We scoured the higher education sites small and large to find which universities with a similar satellite campuses were doing well. My team and myself studied a narrowed down list of universities and documented what we liked and didn’t like along with what worked well and what didn’t. Read the study below:
USF Consolidation Competitive Analysis
In order to migrate the 50k plus pages of the two satellite campuses, first we had to do a full content inventory. There were strict limitations on content as the university’s accreditation was dependent on passing standards of The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. Once we knew what content we would need to keep we started planning user-centered design for use of the two new sites in relation to the overall USF main site. I worked with the developers to get the templates in place and tested them with user testing to come up with a final sitemap for both sites (see the content inventory and sketch sitemap below). After a project plan was in place, I managed a group of content contributors to meet the deadline for migrating the content into the new templates.
Old Site Content Inventory and New Taxonomy/Site Structure
After a year of design and planning, we launched the new sites on July 1, 2020. You can see the transformation below and check out the St. Pete live site.
Old USF St. Pete and Sarasota Sites
Final Site at Launch
Check out the St. Pete campus live site
After positioning itself as a preeminent research university, a campaign that took 8 years of meeting state-specified requirements, the University of South Florida began the process of rebranding. Competing with much larger schools (UF and FSU), the concept was to establish the university as one the state’s big three universities. The goal was to redesign an image (through web, social, and advertisements) that touted the unique USF experience (spread out over multiple campuses in both the city and on the beach), as well as the overall diversity of the student/faculty body, and value of the degree earned vs money spent.
The early stages of rebranding consisted of an IPSOS study that was conducted nationally to gauge students and parents’ understanding and association with the USF Brand. Once we knew the problem areas (people unaware of our location, what the USF acronym stood for, the size our our university), we had an idea on where to start with the rebranding process.
While our team hired an external creative team to create the aesthetics (ad treatments, logo, color palette etc), the concepts that drove the reimagining of our brand were brainstormed and decided in collaboration. Eventually a look and and campaign that emphasized the future and helped define USF’s location and market position were decided upon. After we had a general idea of what we wanted this new brand to look like, we got to work on the website/social aesthetic we wanted to convey.
Running various UX studies allowed for us to focus on where our website lacked and a wishlist of items that would improve the look and function of our interface. Scouring the top AAU accredited colleges, me and my team cherry-picked our favorite design features and what we thought worked well. Along with colleges, we looked at other dynamically designed sites for inspiration as well as to understand how to implement new features we were adding. You can see the full competitive analysis below:
USF Redesign Competitive Analysis
As the agency honed in on the final brand assets, we decided on our final templates for the site. Our homepage layout would be more of a place to callout the major accomplishments of our university in more digestible and dynamic content blocks. The content strategy made it easier for the type of student we wanted to find what they needed (i.e. international students or students interested in research). We were able to figure out who these students were and how they interacted with the site by doing persona studies.
We also implemented color palette and dynamic design template changes for our 200+ secondary sites with an average of 800+ content contributing CMS users. With this scale of rollout, it was important to keep the campus communicators informed in the overall rebranding process and allow for them to voice opinions on the direction of the project.
You can see some of the ad planning for the “Future Without Limits” campaign. While there were ultimately a couple of iterations of the logo, the final style guide for the project can be seen below.
While the national ads ran magazine placements began, they were all being funneled to what was the newly designed website. See the higher ed award winning design below or check out the live site at usf.edu.
Old USF Website Design
USF Redesigned Site
