We were approached by Rockford Public Schools to bid on a full-scale website redesign and re-platforming for their entire school district, one of the largest in Michigan.

Over the course of a year, JCM worked with key stakeholders at Rockford Public Schools from the Superintendent to a committee of teachers and parents to plan and execute the website redesign and development. We chose WordPress as the CMS platform for ease of use on the client side for content updates, which they wanted to be much more frequent than their previous system which had less intuitive content editing capabilities.

Key custom-built features of the project included: robust user permissions system, an interactive district map, a categorized events calendar, an email notification system for parents, and careful consideration of the navigational user experience to make all information easily findable by packing a lot of options into a limited space.

Metrics of “time on site” and “average pageviews” both increased by over 3X after the new site launched, and those performance improvements have lasted for over three years. We attribute this to the variety of interactive features, as well as building the user experience in a way that teaches people the complexities of its content organization as part of its interface design, rather than relying on the need for instructional design elements.