Cape Fear Community College
website redesign
With nearly 23,000 students, Cape Fear Community College is the 6th largest community college in North Carolina. Providing world-class workforce training and quality higher education for the citizens of Southeastern North Carolina, the service area includes New Hanover and Pender counties with locations in downtown Wilmington, Castle Hayne, Burgaw, and Surf City.
As a top community college in North Carolina, CFCC wanted a website redesign with a "wow factor" that focused more on prospective students, streamlined apply path, mobile friendly for increasing mobile visitors.
“The fact that Springer had worked with other North Carolina community colleges was a determining factor...we knew they had done this before and faced many of the same hurdles they’d face with our site.”
– Sonya Johnson, Director of Marketing and Communications
The Challenge
With a multi-site structure of 142 sites, over 2000 pages, and over 100 website editors, CFCC found it difficult to control and streamline the content being produced. This contributed to dated, incompliant documents, low-contrasting colors, uncaptioned images, duplicate content, broken links, poorly structured pages, and more.
“We were in desperate need of a fresh start. Aside from the need to optimize for ADA and WCAG compliance, we needed to improve the site’s mobile responsiveness, on-page SEO, and its overall usability/user-experience.”
– Erin Fabian, Digital Marketing Specialist and Website Redesign Project Coordinator
Our Approach
Websites of this size with complex functionality and integrations, require a full team approach. IT personnel from both CFCC and Springer Studios were included on the project team from day one, along with marketing and project management. Weekly team calls contributed to the progression of the project.
Significant points of the website redesign included the primary navigation and site architecture, an amazing design to “wow higher-ups and make an impact for students”, an optimized, mobile friendly site, and to keep the focus of the site centered around the top interests of the prospective student. We also implemented guided pathways in a prominent location on the home page to enhance ease of use and to get visitors where they need to go efficiently.
Our Results
CFCC is thrilled with its redesigned website that is “tremendously more navigable, shareable, organized, accessible, user friendly, and modernized”.
The design is clean, high-impact, stunning on mobile, and brimming with institutional pride. Each one of CFCC's academic program pages now features fresh, student-focused content. The entire site is consistent and cohesive — both in imagery and content — so visitors know this is a top higher education institution.
“We were most impressed with the quality of work. They truly about doing things the right way. If at any point we noticed something that wasn’t working properly, they would address the issue with patience and fix it. We loved working with Springer Studios!”