SkyView Website
CASE STUDY

Project Overview

SkyView Academy has been a client since 2018, and we have always had the goal of redeveloping the website.  The old website was outdated, poorly designed and received a lot of negative feedback from users. Atomic Idea was able to provide a very competitive bid to redevelop the website from scratch, including user research, creating user personas, journeys and flow maps. It was our goal to create a new, modern, user friendly, informative and visually engaging website for SkyView Academy. 

We started with a discovery session and user interviews to identify the goals, requirements, challenges and scope of work for the new website. This allowed us to understand the entire user universe, the priorities for the website and guided us in mapping out a strategy. 

Atomic Strategy

Atomic Idea created unique user personas identifying the main SkyView website visitors. 

Atomic Idea revamped the website organization, creating a new sitemap.  This provided a more streamlined user experience and quick access to needed information. 

Atomic Idea provided several design concepts based on the discovery and competitor research.  We collaborated with SkyView Academy to select one and refine it based on feedback. The result was a big departure from the old website, with a bold and visually impactful design.

Atomic Idea worked closely with the team at SkyView Academy to identify the functionality needs of the website, streamlining the backend management and updating process. A few of things we implemented:

1. All elements of the design were carefully coded to ensure that the website would display beautifully on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. We created three client selectable custom design templates that allow for customization of layout, content and visuals. Atomic Idea developed the site so that content managers could simply edit text, images and video in the WordPress CMS without touching code or design.
2. SkyView Academy commonly creates new blog posts and pages with the above design sets. As a result, they also needed custom call to action elements that can easily be inserted and edited by a variety of content managers. Atomic Idea created four separate call-to-action elements. These elements are custom designed and easily inserted using the WordPress CMS system. 
3. SkyView Academy needed the ability to update the site with a wide variety of topics that would be available to various groups of people (students of different ages, parents, prospective parents, etc.). To solve this problem and make the website easy to maintain, Atomic Idea ensured that with a single click of a taxonomy category in the WordPress CMS, the content would automatically populate to other areas of the website. 
4. The Douglas County School’s emergency alert system can be controlled by SkyView Academy. When SkyView Academy sends an alert (snow day, etc.), they can choose to automatically call, text, email and send an alert to RSS. The SkyViewAcademy.org website automatically checks for emergency alerts in the RSS feed every 5 minutes. When and if an alert is found, it will copy the alert to the WordPress CMS along with the appropriate taxonomy category. On the Home page a banner will be displayed for one day with a link to the full text of the alert. The banner is conditional: if no alert is found, then no banner will be displayed. This conditional emergency alert system ensures SkyView Academy only has to send one alert from one system. On their previous website, they had to manually copy the alert and manually disable it after one day.
5. SkyView Academy has an active social media presence. It was vitally important to implement social media features on the site. Thus, the site includes stunning Facebook, YouTube and Instagram feeds that can be directly interacted with on the SkyViewAcademy.org website. 

Powerful Results

The new website is launched September 1, 2021. The new website is already getting rave reviews from the internal team for the design and usability. We streamlined many of the posting processes, linking pages and improving workflow for content publishing which has reduced the internal tasks for their team.

Atomic Idea is great to work with! Very detailed work and cares about the direction the company wants to go and where they should invest.

– Lori Bachtel