Bridging the gap between education and career.
The Challenge
How do you create an engaging, on-brand website in an expedited timeline for an internship program in Eastern Shore, Alabama?
The Approach
Leverage the Squarespace platform and an existing brand package to deliver a fully functioning and optimized website that is easy to update for the client.
Connecting students to hands-on industry experience.
Eastern Shore Bridge is an internship initiative put forward by the Eastern Shore Chamber Foundation, AIDT, Innovate Alabama, and the Baldwin County School System. The purpose of the program is to connect high school seniors with vetted, paid internships in their field of interest.
For students, this is an opportunity to bridge the gap that exists between school and a career, learning valuable skills and getting their foot in the door with potential employers. For employers, it’s a way to access new talent and support the local economy while making an impact on the industry.
To put it all together, the team needed a website for the program. The website needed to be easy to navigate for both students and employers and encourage engagement and sign ups from both parties. This website would also be the undisputed call to action destination for all campaigns that followed.
During our first discovery calls, our client made it clear that time was of the essence. We had to move. Fast. The good news was that they already had a full suite of brand deliverables, including colors, fonts, logos, assets, etc. They even had website copy for us.
That meant that all we needed to do was focus on designing and developing the site. Since time was a precious commodity and the clock was already ticking, we jumped straight into Squarespace as the preferred option. This would allow us to build fast. It would also allow the client to make edits and add new sections and pages with ease long after handoff.
The stage was set. We got the green light. It was time to build a website!
With an existing brand and website copy already preloaded and ready for us to use, we were able to move right into the fun part.
We designed the pages of the website to be simple and informative while showing off the established brand. We separated the site into four main pages:
- Home
- Intern
- Employer
- Donate
This simplicity in the site’s layout made it so that people who landed on the site could cut straight to the important information and get signed up for the opportunity. We also made sure that the design stayed simple enough so that every creative choice we made was able to be replicated on Squarespace’s somewhat limited platform. No room for customizations here.
We kept communications fast and efficient with our client, showing finished pages as they became available and making quick tweaks along the way.
With the design for the website fully approved by the client, we started developing. Since we were using the Squarespace platform, this portion of the project moved quickly.
After what felt like no time at all, our client had a fully functioning website that was live and optimized for every platform, ready for eager students and businesses to start signing up.
Today, the website continues to evolve, and our client has continued to build out landing pages for new campaigns with ease.
