From the Nominator

UW–Madison’s University Marketing team is charged with leading the creative marketing and digital stewardship of the UW brand. Our brand website is a key way that we communicate our brand and visual identity to campus. Over time, our brand website, brand.wisc.edu, outgrew its original hierarchy. Through peer research, we uncovered that the site’s structure and labeling were not aligned with other university brand sites, and some common features and tools were missing. We wanted to emphasize self-service, enabling campus staff to quickly find brand resources and get their questions answered. We saw an opportunity to reduce content, making the site lighter and easier to navigate. We overhauled the site by restructuring the information architecture, redesigning page layouts, refreshing existing content, and adding new content. We specifically focused on developing consistent content across pages, revamping the site's organization and global navigation, and building a tools-and-templates resource library. A survey showed that 77% of participants felt that the brand site was very helpful or helpful, and 67% of participants said that the new site was more helpful than the previous version. The newly added resource library has an engagement rate near 90% and is the most visited page on the site. While the previous site had a 44% average engagement rate (April 1 to Oct. 26, 2023), the redesigned site has an 80% average engagement rate (Oct. 27, 2023 to Feb. 12, 2023).

From the Judges

We liked the project and felt it was well researched and thought out. Additionally, we believed having a gallery to see examples of how to implement the materials was helpful and smart. Kudos for a site that functions as intended and has a great layout and navigation!