People want to look at a Web site and see themselves. That goes for your audience of prospective and current students, faculty, staff, alumni and parents, as well as your internal community of engaged stakeholders.
Every higher ed site redesign involves a huge number of personalities, opinions, hopes and dreams. And you can't just ignore them— if your community feels detached from the redesign process, they'll find things to complain about no matter how great the site looks or works.
Our consulting work— which is part of every job we take on at White Whale— is about taking a careful accounting of your community's concerns and opinions. By giving everyone on your campus (or campuses) a voice early on in the process, we build valuable buy-in— often securing some breathing room to make more risky and innovative design decisions later in the process.
The scope of our consulting varies from the preliminary work of identifying Web redesign priorities to general design, information architecture and content consulting. We are strategic consultants for any job we do. But we do take on consulting-only gigs as an opportunity to share our experience, expertise and advice with your staff, letting your team do the heavy lifting with guidance from us.
We put a high value on research, and invest as much time into the front end of a process as is necessary until we have the kind of complete understanding of your particular needs and concerns that is required for a truly collaborative, personalized work process.