The Capella Education Company (CEC) web site was redesigned with several goals in mind. First and foremost, it needed an updated look and feel to tie in with the Capella University web site. The idea was that these two sites needed to be part of the same family, but still distinct sites. This was accomplished with the use of color and other elements such as tabbed navigation and the updated logo.
Another large part of the redesign was accommodating new content, and bringing more information to the front. The homepage now contains a flash piece with videos on “What it’s like to earn an online degree,†as well as facts on Capella and up-to-date news releases. This helps to give visitors (consisting mostly of investors and the media) a good understanding of Capella Education Company and it’s subsidiary, Capella University.
Many people were involved in the redesign of this site. Grant Eull deserves the most credit for coming up with the initial concept for this site, pushing Capella beyond the traditional 800×600 screen resolution. From there, Jason Galep helped to flesh out the mockup, working on placement of elements and layouts for the secondary pages. When Grant and Jason left Capella I took over, finalizing the header (updated logo and integrating tabbed navigation), the flash piece, and other elements on the page. I then enlisted the help of Valerie Allen to style the secondary page navigation. At that point I created the templates for the site using XHTML and CSS and passed the site off to our development team including Linda Tuma and Jeff Hoffman.