The Health and Community Studies department of MacEwan College, located in Edmonton, Alberta, wanted to develop a small but comprehensive landing page that it could direct all of its marketing efforts towards.
Previously HCS was forced to use links to various portions of the MacEwan College general website, which they felt fragmented their message and often required very long, obscure urls to be included in their advertising and print materials. They instead wanted to develop a small but comprehensive portal site that visitors could use to quickly get a sense of what program streams they had to offer. They also wanted to include changeable student testimonials and to display the various infosessions available.
"My mission was to make a site that was as automated and self-maintaining as possible", says Grant Shepert, lead developer for Clever Technology and project lead for the new HSA portal site. "I knew they weren't interested in a site that would require constant attention, so I focused upon leveraging the information that all ready existed, but was spread around the larger, college-wide website."
One of the most important tasks was creating a compact tool for browsing through the 20+ program streams that HCS offered. "I chose Flash because it offered the best combination of interaction, graphical appeal and ease in updating," said Grant. The system uses snapshots of exising page banners for each program, and uses a combination of slide show and 'wheel-style' navigation to display the program streams in a small footprint area.
Another innovation was an automated process that collected HSA-specific infosessions from the main website and displayed them on the new portal. The main website was never designed to syndicate this information, but through a careful rework of the original display pages we were able to create a system that was reliable and completely hands-free.
About Clever Technology Inc.
Clever Technology Inc. is a full-service web design and development company founded in 1995 and located in Edmonton, Alberta. We focus on developing solutions that enhance an organization's daily operation, allowing them to explore new opportunities by leveraging the unique possibilities of the web.
For more information visit www.clevertechnology.com.
