Client List & Portfolio

Client Background & Needs 

A private system of higher education founded in 1922, La Sierra University (LSU) is a Seventh-day Adventist institution in Riverside, California, that sprawls over 150 lush acres. LSU provides access to excellent higher education opportunities through its business, education and religion programs. The College of Arts and Sciences offers Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees. With 2,098 enrolled students, a wealth of diversity and a passion for community engagement, La Sierra shares a connection with Loma Linda University’s Church of Seventh-day Adventists, home to one of the largest Adventist congregations in the world. 

The University required a website that connects and forms a seamless transition between its online and offline presences. Achieving this entailed a brand new site architecture, a design that visually and stylistically matched its direct mail and brochures and development to serve multiple audiences, including current and prospective students, alumni and internal staff. Creating a site which is visually compelling and appealing began with aggregating and organizing information in an intuitive way, making it easily accessible to visitors. Finally, infusing La Sierra’s branding and messaging into the redesign crafted a truly valuable resource.

EMG Approach & Solution 

To provide La Sierra University with an engaging, informative and eye-popping website redesign, EMG gathered input from the LSU community. Using audience insight and feedback, EMG redesigned the overall user experience with emphasis on ease-of-use, intuitive navigation and visual appeal. To meet LSU’s needs, EMG added an intuitive quick links component for ease of navigation, automated the site’s news and calendar functionality and swapped out their two basic templates with five new ones to showcase and offset key content. Backed by a powerful Enterprise Content Management System, TYPO3, the new site allows staff to easily edit and update content to make universal changes without any required programming knowledge.

The Tactics

• Audit of website and all marketing materials
• 200 hour discovery and research phase consisting of complete site audit
• Conducted stakeholder, faculty, staff, administration, prospective and current student focus groups
• Designed information architecture and creative for new site
• Integrated Content Management System solution (TYPO3) with custom components
• Conducted onsite staff training for the new components in the Content Management System
• Developed and implemented a content migration plan