Dartmouth

When one of the best universities in America needed to speak to the next generation of change-makers, it turned to Third and Grove. Dartmouth’s website is the first digital touchpoint the school’s visitors see. To reimagine the site, we considered how to best demonstrate the unique, diverse experience Dartmouth has to offer.
 

A higher education website like Dartmouth’s is a hub for prospective and current students,
community members, faculty and staff, and press and media; it’s the meeting place for all to
gather. To best understand how to serve multiple audiences, we needed to conduct a site audit and digital strategy exploration.

After investigating how the site worked for different personas, we realized that tailoring it to
prospective students would have a ripple effect, reminding all other groups why they should be a part of Dartmouth.

From there, our strategy and design would work hand-in-hand

The Dartmouth Redesign

To get prospective students excited, we wanted the Dartmouth story to leap off the homepage. We knew that creating a design that focused on highlighting the welcoming, inclusive, close-knit community at Dartmouth would elevate the school’s current digital presence.

The solution: a modern, user-friendly, flexible homepage that would seamlessly integrate within their established multisite. By using an all-hands-on-deck approach, we utilized the expertise of our team and Dartmouth’s Internal Web Services and the Office of Communications teams to make the magic happen.

But first! Migrating their site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was crucial; it allowed us to incorporate enhancements and previously unavailable features.

Highlight

During the strategy phase, we arrived at the “For You” menu feature to give the user a meaningful, user-friendly, navigational experience that got them to where they needed to go. By working with Dartmouth to implement the feature, we could house each identified audience with their own ecosystem of information, just a click away. This design allowed for a more personalized touch.

For the redesign, we hit our goals of making sure every page worked seamlessly with the next, and the uniqueness of Dartmouth radiated throughout. The final result is exactly how we envisioned the site to be.