I first began working with founder Zippy Thumim in 2013. Design Alive had grown significantly and their DIY website was holding them back.
Working with Design Alive’s bright and appealing brand colors, we restructured their website completely, showing off their student portfolios and key selling points of the classes. Internally, Design Alive staff can easily update course information and add to student portfolios.
Zippy re-approached Highlight Creative a few years later. Design Alive staff were still doing a lot of manual administrative work offline, and she asked how we might automate some of that through the website. After thoroughly discussing the student onboarding process, we made some changes.
Clarifying and automating the contact form:
Design Alive’s prospectus has answers to most of the inquiries they received. The updated form clarifies what the prospectus contains (and makes it harder to ignore), resulting in a significant decrease in admin time. The form notifications were also improved, automatically filtering new contacts who need follow-up.
Streamlining registration:
We gathered all the pieces of the student onboarding process that had collected over the years, and consolidated them into a streamlined student center added to the website.
New students get instant access to the student center when they register. There, they can find class information, calendars, lists of supplies, and directions. Besides cutting staff time, this is particularly instrumental to Design Alive as students sometimes sign up weeks before a course begins. The student center provides immediate value for the fee students have just paid.
We moved tuition payments to the student center and streamlined the interface to help students manage payments easily.
At my suggestion, Design Alive switched payment gateways, resulting in reduced per-payment rates, and a modern system that fully integrates with Design Alive’s website, allowing students to handle their billing information.
