Content Strategy Execution
Executed a mobile-first, early-era UX content strategy to unify product content across hundreds of web pages
Content Writing and Management
Created new content and evolved existing content for clarity and tone, tracking production and progress
Guideline
Codified content best practices for post-launch web producers, including core SEO guidance
Higher education | 2014 - 2017
Pepperdine is a nationally ranked, faith-based university located in Malibu, California, offering distinctly different student experiences for undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students.
For their mobile-first, UX-driven web redesign, I guided content additions, removals, rewrites and layout to improve way-finding, strengthen SEO and "warm up" any stiff or overly academic brand communication. Pepperdine also wanted to prioritize the prospective student audience without excluding parents and families. This required content relocation to ensure new users could engage with the sites without being forced through irrelevant funnels.
The work included an information architecture overhaul and content migration for the main university site, the School of Law, the Graduate School of Education and Psychology, the School of Public Policy and the School of Business and Management at Pepperdine.
This was an interesting challenge -- an entirely new industry and campus environment while (ironically?) working on a TV movie rewrite for Disney Channel that took place on campus at a boarding school. Following the launch, I was hired to consult with some of those schools and helped them apply the new user-driven thinking to their sites and solutions.
Additional contributions:
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guided work flow, bringing the site furthest behind in production to the furthest ahead
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built and edited hundreds of pages under tight deadlines
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established best practices for future writers and web producers
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provided input on CMS development and instructional language
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helped individual department heads identify tailored solutions for their distinct content needs
Hover for details:
1 cup
Sugar
3 cups
Blueberries
hierarchal way-finding
friendly image that puts student at the center of a positive experience
elevated social media links
clearly labeled next steps (limited to three)
clean, flat design with white space allowed
"fat" footer
floating/sticky share button
Same page before redesign:
3 cups
Blueberries
1 cup
Sugar
photo that does not have students at the center of the story
multiple navigations diminished focus
dated design elements
dry copy with old-guard commands like "click" and "navigate," which are now givens in this context
valuable-but-deep content that can be better distributed into sub-pages
key news buried at the bottom of the page
Strategy endurance:
Content structure and strategy has endured through a second redesign. In some instances, even the product copy I created remains; in others, school-specific nuances ("Contact an Advisor" vs. "Contact Us") on a CTA) show a change in language to serve business goals or clearer pathways to meaningful action.
Now
Hover for launch version:
Launch
