— The challenge
Every semester, the marketing division leads a creative campaign to encourage students to register for classes. Originally, this campaign was created to promote only the summer semester, and the website served as a hub to answer all of students' questions that were unique to the summer semester (by providing information on term lengths, housing, etcetera).
— The goals of this project
- Implement creative campaign themes on the website by translating them from print and social media materials
- Increase semester enrollment, especially during winter and summer special terms
— The solutions
- Simple layouts reliant on creative CSS to embellish the look and feel of the site
An award-winning campaign
Winner of the Gold CASE award for best microsite in 2021
Showing a different side of UNT
The UNT Registration campaign is an award-winning effort encouraging students to register for classes. It started out as a campaign to increase exposure about summer offerings, but the campaign was so successful that it now runs year-round for fall and spring semesters, as well as the newly-launched winter session.
What made this campaign so successful? Rethinking our approach to the web without compromising usability and accessibility.
The particular artwork featured on this page is 20s themed, but we also have used themes like videogames, television shows, and other pop-culture references.
Creativity and Clean Code, Uncompromised
We did not compromise accessibility or performance by using the following techniques:
- WebP image formats and lazy loading to restore performance by over 80%
- Meeting AAA Accessibility standards, improving user experience and search rankings
Collaboration between creatives
Because the Registration campaign necessitated attention-getting, out-of-the-box marketing, it was a wonderful opportunity for designers, photographers, writers, and other creatives to collaborate. In the web development department, we are often siloed: focused on troubleshooting, updating features, and generating quick results. For the registration campaign, I was really able to lean on CSS to achieve unusual, but nonetheless accessible and performant, results.