Client Visit to Culver Academies
Earlier this month, Westwerk team members Amy, Maria and Scott traveled to Indiana to visit new client Culver Academies. Culver Academies is a private college preparatory school for grades 9-12, whose mission is to develop and nurture the full person – mind, spirit and body. Culver takes pride in providing a strong foundation for students to succeed in college and beyond, and wanted to elevate its institution’s news site to demonstrate its student successes.
The workshop kicked off with an extensive review of Culver’s existing news site analytics and social media, discussion on best practices, and general conversation around the institution’s overall goals. This meeting helped get both teams on the same page and solidify project goals and benchmarks from which the success of the project will be evaluated against.
The goals workshop was followed by a golf cart tour of the campus, given by two students attending the academies (thanks Wilson and Hannah!). Located on pristine Lake Maxinkuckee, the campus is surrounded by beautiful landscape and amazing architecture. The tour included visiting Culver’s renowned horse stables, immaculate classrooms and charming campus, learning about Culver’s traditions and values along the way.
In the afternoon, we held an extensive user summit where we met with representatives from the summer camp program, parent communications, international student representatives, and alumni reps to discuss in detail each of the audiences that will be using the news site. By discussing goals, behavior, expectations and more, we were able to gain firsthand knowledge from these enthusiastic, knowledgeable representatives.
Switching gears (and locations), we moved across campus and into the basement of Culver to meet with the Culver Academies IT team. After throwing around some developer-centric jokes, we were able to knock out our technical discussion, focusing on hosting, security, WordPress stability, and more.
The workshop wrapped up with a creative exploration into trends, best practices, preferences and dislikes, where we got a better understanding for Culver’s preferred aesthetic and direction, which will be translated first into mood boards, and then into a new design!
Our time learning, planning and exploring at Culver was well spent. We are looking forward to working with them to give their news site a new life. Stay tuned for the upcoming re-launch of Culver Academies News!
