NCSU Poole School of Management

A Dynamic Site for a Nationally Recognized Business School

The Poole College of Management offers a dynamic learning experience for students pursuing a business education. Since its founding in 1992, Poole has built a national reputation that has earned recognition from Bloomberg Businessweek, U.S. News and World Report, and Financial Times. 

In order to gain a competitive edge, we worked with Poole and partner agency FWV to build a website that would showcase the school’s diverse academic programs, their team of accomplished faculty members, and their student body’s commitment to making an impact in the Research Triangle area and beyond. 

Joining the (Wolf)pack

As with many of our higher education website design projects, we wanted to build a site that would connect seamlessly with the institution’s other web platforms. In this case, that meant carefully reviewing and implementing elements from NC State’s branding and web visual language style guide. Elements like color, typeface, formatting, and even individual content blocks are carried throughout the Poole site and mirror the general look and feel of the school’s larger digital presence. 

Heading into the project, we were tasked with some behind-the-scenes work that would ensure the site’s functionality and ability to capture organic leads. We dug into information architecture research to develop an intuitive navigation strategy, then worked through some SEO planning to position the site in a way that would generate traffic and gain traction on search engines. We also partnered with NC State to get the site hosted on their own infrastructure system. 

Intentional Design 

From the homepage onward, the site utilizes a clean, modern layout that’s designed to engage visitors and help them quickly reach the content that they came to the site looking for. This is accomplished through dynamic integrations for social media and calendar events, eye-catching statistics, and a dedicated “spotlight” zone where the school can highlight recent news articles or key stories. 

When thinking through the website's design, our deep knowledge of higher ed website design best practices was extremely helpful in guiding the project towards a successful result. 

 

The site’s interior is a fitting continuation of these efforts to grab visitors’ attention. Interior pages are largely characterized by clear organization, crisp images, and easy access to additional information. For example, the Academics page helpfully outlines each of the school’s departments and guides visitors towards topic-specific pages on particular degree programs.

These intuitive wayfinding design elements are especially important when working with a site that serves such a broad group of stakeholders.

Flexible Upkeep

The site is built on a WordPress base that allows for easy updates and a streamlined process for adding new content. As the school continues to grow, site administrators will be able to choose from over a dozen content “blocks” to quickly build out custom templates that are naturally cohesive with the rest of the site. This will allow the school to keep all content up-to-date.

With the launch of the site, Poole has refreshed its digital presence in a way that shows the school’s unique character while remaining consistent with the NC State visual identity. The flexible WordPress setup gives them all the necessary tools to continue scaling and managing the site over time.