Creating a Vibrant Digital Space for Loyalist College

Evolving Web worked closely with Loyalist College to redesign and redevelop the College’s main website, integrating it with services to create a unified digital experience. The new platform, built in WordPress, equips staff with enhanced content management tools, enabling them to communicate Loyalist's value proposition through creative design solutions that bring the College's new brand to life. This project is in line with the goal to offer a modern, user-friendly online platform that reflects the College’s commitment to providing practical, hands-on education. By delivering a compelling user experience, the website highlights Loyalist's diverse academic programs and services, while showcasing how the College meets the needs of regional industry and community partners.

Loyalist College, located across Belleville, Port Hope, Bancroft and Tyendinaga in Ontario, is a vibrant community college that offers a wide range of certificate, diploma, advanced diploma, and post-graduate programs aimed at preparing students for a successful career in various fields. Known for its supportive and engaging learning environment, Loyalist provides hands-on, future-focused training that emphasizes skills development and real-world experience. The College is dedicated to innovation, inclusivity, and community engagement, creating an environment where students can thrive academically and personally.

The main goal was to design and develop a WordPress website for Loyalist College that applies the new brand, clearly conveys the College’s value proposition, and creates a first-class user experience. The new website integrates courses, a staff directory content, allows for payment through a series of dynamic forms, and gives staff access to publishing workflows using their LDAP login. With the primary audience of prospective students, the new website’s goal is to support student recruitment and conversion efforts, and be a platform for lead generation and recruitment. At the same time, it supports current students, faculty, and staff.

While our primary focus with this project was on prospective students, there were many different user journeys we had to support, from identifying  admissions dates and deadlines, to accessing the student portal and transcripts, to finding information about campus and program options, and orienting staff and international students about their unique needs. Due to the diversity of content and program options, we had to integrate courses and programs to increase findability. Similarly, we had the challenge of developing a custom process to automate the daily import of a provided staff directory interface file generated from the College’s HRIS (Human Resources Information System), ensuring the staff directory on the website remains consistently updated and accurate.

We ran workshops to understand the needs of Loyalist staff and students, including many stakeholders in the process. Our discovery work led to improvements in the information architecture create pathways based on the situation and mode of a user, resulting in a more streamlined content-centric approach. Information architecture improvements extended to search, content recommendations, and better structured program content. We also created clearer pathways between the main website and subsites so that these experiences would feel more unified and connected. The new WordPress website integrates many of Loyalist’s information systems—from courses to the staff directory—while incorporating enhanced security for a reliable user experience.

Our work included: 

• A fresh visual identity for the website reflecting the new brand including an extensible style guide and conveying the confident, vibrant, friendly and innovative nature of the Loyalist community 
• Incorporating the Loyalist dot motif strategically as a visual graphic to break up components, create rhythm and imbue the page with a sense of creativity and friendliness
• Creating an experience that feels fresh, colourful, creative, hands-on, and gives users the confidence to take the next step to apply to Loyalist College
• A content audit, technical audit and analytics to inform the migration, the redesign, and development decision
• Creating a cohesive SEO and analytics strategy to improve lead generation potential
• Multisite architecture to support scalability of the College’s offerings, with customization of the look and feel accommodated by child themes
• Creating a library of components using the WordPress block editor, to build content such as accordions, videos and image embeds
• Content publishing capabilities including previews, reusable media, and image cropping
• Compliance with WCAG AA accessibility guidelines and AODA standards
• Testing accessibility compliance using screen readers, keyboards and tools accessibility tests such as Axe, SortSite and contrast checkers
• Seamless integration of an events calendar plugin
• Development of a custom post type to support emergency announcements across the multisite architecture
• Integration with Loyalist’s Azure AD (Entra ID) for author logins
• Implementing forms using Gravity Forms
• Integration of program and course data from Banner using an XML feed and an automated synchronization, so course and program information is automatically updated through a secure data feed
• Integrating an HRIS (human resources information systems) to ensure the staff directory is always up-to-date and accessible online
• Configuring WordPress to send outbound email from the website through Office 365, which was already used for Loyalist College email
• Creating a “Related content” widget to help users cross-reference courses and news that share the same metadata or are explicitly curated to appear on a given page
• A hierarchical, keyword-based search function that can pull up documents, files and information across the entire website and parse PDF files (i.e., search within documents) powered by Google Programmable Search, plus dedicated search pages for specific post types with taxonomy and metadata filters
• Automated content migration to the new WordPress website
• New information architecture to handle News, Events, Programs, Courses, Staff, Testimonials, and Emergency Announcements
• Deployment to Pantheon Cloud Hosting

Loyalist College’s redesigned and redeveloped website is a modern, user-friendly digital platform that integrates with various services, provides staff with advanced content management tools and aligns with the College’s brand and educational values. It enhances the student user experience by supporting recruitment, conversion and retention efforts while offering a seamless journey from inquiry to application, enrolment, and student life engagement.