A redesigned admissions page to consolidate information for prospective families and boost engagement.
Project background.
Menlo Park Academy is a tuition-free, public charter school serving gifted children across Northeast Ohio. I attended Menlo for middle school and remained connected with Carol Ryan, Director of Enrollment and Advancement. During Carol’s time in this role, I worked with her and Menlo’s team to significantly improve the school’s website and online positioning. One focus of our work was the Admissions section. The section, which spanned eight pages when our engagement started, made it difficult for prospective families to find information, inquire about enrolling in the school, and participate in admissions events.
Services leveraged.
Web Design
My unique approach.
I worked with Carol and the Menlo Admissions team to restrategize and redesign the Admissions page, turning it into a one-stop hub for information and prospective family engagement. At the beginning of the project, Menlo had separate pages for the admissions process, gifted indicators, qualification criteria, re-enrollment, and sibling enrollment. I first aimed to consolidate these pages into a single page separated into easily digestible sections. I also aspired to incorporate more color, media, and diverse ways of presenting information instead of merely having text on the page. Lastly, I worked with Carol to devise a simple campaign to use as the overarching theme for the new page.
What I executed.
Menlo’s Admissions page evolved from eight individual pages to one hub broken into various sections as families scroll down the page. The page’s theme—”Help your gifted child flourish at Menlo Park Academy”—boldly rests in the page’s hero, with the typography styling woven throughout the rest of the sections as headings. The page includes a clear navigation section beneath the introduction with four tiles to jump users to different pages of the page upon clicking.
The “Why Menlo?” section brings two videos about Menlo Park Academy and its approach to education told through the lens of staff members to the forefront. From there, the “Admissions Process” section beautifully breaks down the four steps with colored cards. The “Admissions Events” section includes detailed information about information nights, open houses, testing days, and tours in collapsable accordions to prevent overwhelming the user. An adjacent events calendar allows quick access to register for upcoming events. Lastly, the page includes simplified explanations of gifted criteria and indicators from both Menlo and the State of Ohio, plus a final CTA to bring prospective families to Menlo’s admissions portal.
The impact of my work.
- Increased engagement from prospective families by removing the need to search for information.
- The web page created an optimized home for other campaigns (e.g., paid advertising) to drive traffic.
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