Watkins College of Art in Nashville website awarded a Circle of Excellence Gold Award by CASE, the Council for the Advancement of Secondary Education.
Pixelslam is proud to have developed a new website for Watkins College of Art in Nashville that has been awarded a Circle of Excellence Gold Award by CASE, the Council for the Advancement of Secondary Education.
This award is one of three issued by CASE to recognize best practices, outstanding work and advancements in higher education. The Circle of Excellence is an international awards program honoring work in alumni relations, communications, marketing and more at college and universities. This year, the award program received over three-thousand entries in nearly 100 categories from almost 700 educational institutions. Of these, only 100 gold awards were given, including one to Watkins College of Art for their newly designed website.
Garrett Pembroke – pixelslam: “We were lucky to work with terrific partners on this project: Watkins Director of Communication Brendan Tapley, the Stoltze Design team from Boston, user-experience expert Deborah Levinson; and the writing team from Thurston-Lighty, LTD.”
“These awards represent and reward the bold, forward-thinking innovations we have made in our communications and marketing,” remarked Watkins President J. Kline
The website was one of the first marketing assets that needed to be addressed immediately after Watkins’ recent rebranding efforts, not just to disseminate the new brand, but to present a new approach to how the school portrayed itself. The website tells the story of the college and showcases its students’ work through a variety of content showcased in a dynamic, highly visual design. The awards attest to the power of that message.
“For a small institution like Watkins to compete at these levels and win their highest honors demonstrates not only the creative power of the college but also the power of a Watkins education,” added Kline.
The new site needed to support a large number of high quality images, be easily updated, and offer both informational content and visual content in an unified and logical manner – while also establishing an environment that readily supports future marketing campaigns.
To accomplish this, our team undertook an extensive review of the existing website and developed an comprehensive UX strategy, including a new navigation and site architecture, a complete rewrite of page content and development of custom post types and page templates supporting the variety of content necessary.
The result was a visually stunning, user-friendly website illustrating the Watkins — and Nashville — experience to web visitors, inspiring and sparking interest in all that Watkins has to offer.