SUNY Westchester Community College
Reimagining SUNY Westchester Community College's website to simplify the user journey for students, supporting their enrollment and engagement goals.
Overview
SUNY Westchester Community College (WCC) partnered with Spark451 to reimagine its institutional website as a more inclusive, accessible, and student-centric experience. Prospective students were navigating a site with fragmented menus, buried enrollment pathways, and no unified voice across departments.
Our objective was to transform the site into a modern and scannable platform that reflects WCC’s welcoming tone, encourages exploration, and helps guide users toward key conversion points such as applying, requesting information, and registering. In parallel, the site needed to uphold WCC’s commitment to accessibility, equity, and digital excellence.
Services
- Web Design
- Information Architecture
- Wireframing
- Content Strategy
- User Research
- Documentation
Timeframe
June 2023 – August 2025
Role
Lead Designer
Collaborators
Jaclyn Fede, Lauren Weiner, Keith Warburg
Challenge
SUNY Westchester Community College (WCC) needed a complete overhaul of its institutional website to better serve prospective and current students, faculty, and the surrounding community. The existing site suffered from poor mobile usability, fragmented navigation, and unclear content hierarchy. Key student pathways such as how to apply, request info, or register were buried under legacy content and inconsistent language. WCC also faced internal challenges: dozens of departments needed to align under a unified voice and structure, all while maintaining WCAG compliance and meeting the SUNY system’s digital expectations.
Strategy
Our core strategic approach was anchored in three pillars:
- Attract & Guide Prospective Students
Create clear, action-driven content pathways to help users discover programs, apply, or request information with fewer clicks. - Support Internal Stakeholders
Ensure current students, faculty, and staff can find what they need quickly, reducing the volume of calls and emails. - Elevate Digital Brand Voice
Humanize WCC’s content tone to reflect its inclusive, student-first identity ensuring sure the voice is confident, clear, and helpful.
Our team created a “Writing for the Web Guide” which we used to unify tone across departments, all while building a scalable page structure that worked for both centralized and distributed content owners.
Design
With mobile-first responsiveness and accessibility as top priorities, we developed wireframes and page templates tailored to user journeys and content scanning behavior. The visual design emphasized large imagery centered around community, clear headings, and CTAs were balanced by brand-consistent typography and flexible content modules. We created modular design systems across all templates to ensure consistency while allowing for flexible storytelling across departments. Designs were reviewed with stakeholders and iterated based on feedback loops built into our sprint cycles.
Build
The site was developed using a responsive grid and built for performance, accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), and search engine optimization (SEO). Custom templates were created for all page types within WordPress to take advantage of its native distributed content editing. Forms were streamlined to reduce friction for requests and applications. Navigation was restructured into a simplified global menu, with additional utility nav for frequently accessed resources like MyWCC, Blackboard, and Student Email. Page titles, meta descriptions, and internal links were optimized to boost search visibility and ensure students could find WCC’s offerings more easily through organic search.
Outcome
Following launch in August 2025, sunywcc.edu saw a 50% increase in site traffic compared to the same period the prior year. Event attendance grew by 35%, with stakeholders attributing the increase directly to improved discoverability and the redesigned events experience — citing student feedback as the source. The redesign now serves as WCC’s digital front door: welcoming, accessible, and built to move students from curiosity to enrollment.
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