Hudson Way Immersion School

Crafting new digital strategy to increase applications

HWIS Overview

Hudson Way Immersion School (HWIS) is a private, dual language immersion school serving students from preschool to the fifth grade. In recent years, HWIS has experienced considerable growth in student enrollment leading the creation of an additional campus and the development of new programs and services. HWIS needed a website that would accurately reflect these changes and display the true depth of services currently being offered. They needed a quality site to match the quality education they provide

Key Problems

As HWIS grew in size and programming, the content that reflected these changes was added to a structure that was built for what had become a fundamentally different organization. User navigation was not intuitive and visitors were left with a sense that the new offerings were “add-ons,” instead of central to the HWIS experience.
At the time of the site rebuild, HWIS was running digital and print campaigns and had leveraged the services of a HubSpot Consultant in order to track key metrics and generate new reports. With these new marketing tactics and data gathering methods, we knew we would need to integrate the results and findings in a seamless way, allowing HWIS to have a clearer understanding of what was, and was not working on their website.
We needed to ensure that the rebuilt site was optimized for mobile access and use. While it was possible to complete key actions on the original site via mobile devices, it was extremely cumbersome and lead to high mobile bounce rates.

Our Approach

We chose to use human-centered design for each step of this rebuild. To achieve this end, we conducted interviews with parents of current HWIS students at both locations and in both languages. This action provided us with a deeper understanding of why the parents choose HWIS, their key decision criteria, and what they saw as the school’s key values. We used this information to anticipate what other parents were looking for in an education provider, prioritized the results and designed the user flow according to our findings.
Most visitors to the site are parents of young children. This demographic does the majority of their browsing on mobile devices. In order to create a pleasant and functional mobile experience, we did a mobile-first design. We worked with HWIS to create these mobile elements and only after these designs were established did we begin translating them to desktop.
We created an integration between the HWIS website and HubSpot. This allowed for seamless sharing, giving HWIS a clear sense of their lead generation, conversion rates, and the effectiveness of their content. We integrated Analytics on the site and built a custom dashboard so HWIS could track their specific goals. These improvements allowed HWIS to continuously run A/B tests to determine what content and strategies are most effective and incrementally incorporate them.

How we helped:

User Research

Through a series of collaborative human-centered-design exercises, we got a deep understanding of the visitors' background, motivations, and pain points.

Content Strategy

We helped ensure the website had an authentic voice which was clear and consistent throughout the site. The sitemap was constructed to ensure no pages were more than a few clicks away.

Design

We created a sleek, modern design aesthetic which was tailored to help achieves the business objectives aligned on during the beginning of the project.

Development

The site was built with mobile responsiveness in mind so there is no diminishment of the user experience regardless of device or browser. We leveraged HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and JQuery and built this on top of the WordPress CMS to ensure it is seamless to update content.

Support

After launch, we provided all the tools and tutorials needed to maintain the website, but we have helped out with analytics tracking, security monitoring, and adding new pages.

After 10 years of working with developers who have an answer for nothing and an excuse for everything, it’s a dream to work with the folks at Creatotech. With minimal effort on our part, we were able to address, and have them address, all of our concerns and perfectly tailor their work to our desires.