Ballet School of Stamford Website
During my Fall 2022 semester at UConn Stamford, I took DMD 4040, the Agency class. I was placed into a team with three other students and we were assigned to help a chosen client with a problem related to digital media. Our client was the Ballet School of Stamford.
Challenge
The biggest issue that was brought to us by the Executive Director was the website. They felt that the website was outdated. It was awkward to navigate and made it difficult to find important information. They wished for us to update the website to be up to modern standards. One of the ways they wished for us to do this was by transitioning the site from WordPress to a different host. They hoped that a better looking website would be able to attract more students, parents, and donations.
Approach
First we created personas of the type of audience that would likely be attracted to the ballet school. This narrowed down our demographic and made it easier for us to focus on how to design the website to appeal to these groups.
Next we considered the options of web hosts to switch to from WordPress. We looked into which sites and companies provided the best prices, which had the capabilities to make a good, modern looking website, and which one would be most accessible and easy to edit so that the school would be able to easily edit the website accordingly after the semester was over. In the end we narrowed it down to two web hosts: Wix and Squarespace. We asked the executive director which they would prefer and in the end they chose Wix, which is what we continued with.
VS
Process
We began working on the new Wix website. We communicated with each other and our client through Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and meeting in person. The overall site went through a design overhaul to modernize it in order to bring it up to modern standards. The navigation was revamped to be less confusing and guide users to important information easier, especially the donation and registration pages. An interactive map that shows the location of the school was added. The old website had a heavy reliance on images with small resolutions so we had to switch out many of them and even had a photoshoot at the school to provide the website with new, high quality pictures. We also heavily redesigned the events page, as the old one used images that were very small and hard to read. Wix Events was used to create the new events page and help organize and create a template that could easily have new events placed into it which would focused on, while automatically moving past events into a separate category that users can read the details of if they wish to.
Outcome
Before
After
