Western Quebec – Website
Created at Kaboom communication design in 2017 with WordPress
With over 30 schools and centres, the Western Quebec School Board provides English-language education throughout the Outaouais and Abitibi-Témiscamingue regions.
An outdated brand image and website brought Western Quebec to completely revamp their identity and online presence in 2017, in an effort to appeal to clients with a number of different intents.
My Role for this Project
- Content strategy
- UX design
- Development planning and management
The Results
- Over 10,000 visits per month
- More than half coming from organic search results
Content Strategy
As for many organizations of a mainly administrative nature, the content of the Western Quebec School Board website was the reflection of their very own administrative structure. It was more akin to an organisational resources directory than to a showcase meant to be used by the general public.
The website’s content was hence reorganized in more public-friendly sections, grouping pages under themes, in order to make navigation more intuitive.
UX Design
Western Quebec School Board’s educational main calling and its particular situation, being the only English-language schoolboard in all of western Quebec, meant that its website had to act as a promotional asset to try and attract more students, aiming its message at parents living on its territory.
The hiring of a new communications consultant, quite adept at creating and promoting online content, meant greater collaboration in laying out the main guidelines that were to drive this new website. Surprisingly, adding a slideshow to the home page ended up being a great idea to create the desired atmosphere, while overlapping promotional boxes allowed for the client to put emphasis on specific news and announcements.
In addition to a quick navigation tool (the “Good Morning” tool), deemed crucial to this project right from the get-go, a drop down list of all of Western Quebec’s schools’ websites and a list of quick links to various sections of the main website quickly became important aspects of the website.
In order to meet the needs of a public primarily composed of parents of students or students-to-be, information regarding the school board’s various schools had to be both easily accessible and appealing, to promote student enrolment. Primary and secondary school pages were created accordingly, allowing users to easily consult information about any specific school, while keeping an interactive overview of the situation.
All this didn’t mean other audiences were left behind. People looking for various pieces of information, regarding school taxes, for example, would find their way through an elaborated, subject-oriented FAQ, just like the “Good Morning” tool.
Development Planning and Management
- Development of the structure of content types
- Planning of interactions (user-interface and content-type-to-content-type relations)
- Planning of functionalities
- Supervision of development (identification of tasks, identification of milestones and quality control)