Naviance
The world’s most widely adopted platform for college & career readiness.
Naviance, by Hobsons, is a comprehensive solution that helps middle and high school students align their strengths and interests to post-secondary goals and improve their outcomes.
The Challenge
With the pending launch of their new College and Careers Readiness Curriculum, the Arlington, VA based Hobsons Inc. needed to revamp their website to accommodate the new product offering, as well as to reposition their existing products. They also wanted much greater flexibility to add additional content mapped to a dynamic site architecture, allow for the simple addition of gated resources, and create standalone landing pages.
Our Solution
We engaged the Naviance marketing team in a robust and fairly extensive Discovery process. Our efforts included a day workshop where we identified key objectives, gathered and summarized stakeholder concerns, and sketched out the marketing sales funnel. In addition, we identified the primary user types and developed preliminary user personas.
From there, we interviewed 11 actual constituents across the user types we had identified, which led to a number of helpful insights that influenced not only our approach to developing content for the website but also other marketing efforts.
Clean UI & Effective
Site Architecture
We organized the content into three primary buckets (Our Platform, Our Curriculum, Our Services), along with a few top-level supporting pages, and designed a clean and clear site architecture that accommodates hundreds of internal pages. We created a responsive sub-navigation element that allows users to navigate a four-level menu structure.
Since we found that the Naviance sales team was fielding a lot of product support questions, we eliminated the catch-all "Contact" page. Instead, we created a "Request a Consultation" page geared towards sales efforts, and a neighboring link to a "Help" page for users looking for support. Finally, we made a clear and obvious login button for users wanting to login to the Naviance product itself, as many users were coming to the marketing website instead of the product portal.
Flexible CMS Implementation
We developed a custom implementation of Craft content management system, taking advantage of the system’s flexibility inherent in that system to create a modular publishing platform. We designed a set of content modules that editors can choose from when posting new content, allowing for total freedom and editorial design, while retaining a consistent look and feel across the site.
“I love this content management system. It not only does everything I want, but I actually look forward to using it!”
Crystal Nikish, Marketing Manager, Hobsons Inc.
Blog Improvements
We updated the blog to allow for easy inclusion of rich content elements, including images, videos, slideshows, and pull quotes. We also created author pages, social media “like” buttons, and the ability to subscribe to the blog and/or Naviance newsletter.
Gated Resource Forms
We developed the ability for the Naviance marketing team to add whitepapers, webinars, and other resources that are gated behind contact forms and integrate directly with their sales platform.
“Our project was managed very well and delivered on-time and on-budget. More importantly, Pinkston Digital delivered a vastly improved web design that helps educate our market about our offerings, and scales to meet the needs of our fast-growing business.”
Dan Obregon, VP Marketing & User Experience, Hobsons Inc.
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