Baltimore City School District
About Baltimore City Schools
Under contract with Digicon Corporation, Ignition72 had the opportunity to design and build a new City Schools website that welcomes all users on any device to a visually positive and robust new website. This site includes important tools like the School Comparison, where kids and parents can explore various school options. We had to ensure that the site was multi-lingual and accessible, while empowering the School District to manage, control and update all aspects of the site.
Great design is a team effort. This project was shaped and guided by user testing and client feedback, we loved collaborating and working together to create a meaningful and useful product.
Learning + Planning
Planning involved a detailed landscape analysis, including Google Analytics data, stakeholder outreach, surveys, user testing as well as an iterative planning review with all internal City School stakeholders. Audiences and their goals were defined, content mapped, functionality documented and wireframes generated to ensure that the City Schools team considered every possibility before settling on the best solution.
Style Exploration
The new City Schools website is clean and clear, with bright primary color splashes to deliver a fresh and modern message, as well as appeal to students. Photography is very upbeat and positive, always showcasing a City Schools community member. Throughout the site color is brought in to draw the eye, but also to create an overwhelmingly positive user experience.
Design + Development
Tailoring the design to our specific audience was very important, so we held multiple user feedback sessions early in the design phase. Walking community members through static layouts and clickable prototypes helped us reaffirm and tweak some of our design decisions.
The site was designed from scratch to be a new Drupal 8 powered system.
Results
The new site launched in January 2019 and within the first month it had over 179K users visit the site over 378K times, spending 2:24 minutes on site, and viewing an average of 2.9 pages per visit. Compared with this time last year this is an increase of 195% in overall traffic, a 114% increase in average time on site and a 198% increase in page views. The bounce rate, or number of people who leave from the first page in less than a minute, dropped by over 112%.
The new site includes robust Google Analytics facilitated through Google Tag manager, so we have granular data relating to everything that happens on the new site.
The final site is hosted by our partners the Digicon Corporation.