Wellesley College Logo

The Ultimate Digital Glow-Up.

Wellesley College

With a decade-old website that no longer reflected Wellesley's standing as a leader in women's education, our task was clear—create a digital experience as intentional and distinctive as Wellesley itself.

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Project at a Glance

  • 2025 CASE Gold Circle of Excellence Award Winner for Institutional Website
  • Overall engagement rate rose to 72%, a 33% increase year over year. 
  • Thorough content optimization reduced the overall size of the site by 88%.
  • Paired with a parallel intranet redesign to ensure internal resources had an equally thoughtful home.

Ambitious Vision

Fastspot extended a new Wellesley brand visual identity into a flexible UI system, balancing heritage with digital needs. We adapted their color palette and typography for the web, creating modular components like program cards and faculty profiles. The system maintained Wellesley's refined aesthetic while solving digital challenges – offering both brand consistency and department-level flexibility across thousands of pages.
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Dynamic homepage experience

Anchored by the "We Are Wellesley" showcase, powerfully communicating institutional identity and priorities through strategic messaging and visuals.
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The "Wellesley 100"

Prospective students explore 100 things that make the school unique, just like they would with a social feed.
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Content Transformation

Fastspot optimized Wellesley's 8,000+ pages into 1,000 pages of intuitive structure and clear prioritization. The result was instantly findable key resources, all while preserving academic depth and storytelling.
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Just the Beginning

More than a redesign, Fastspot created a digital ecosystem that works as hard as Wellesley does—informing, inspiring, and inviting the next generation of leaders to see themselves here. Because when you're shaping future changemakers, your digital presence should be just as transformative.
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Additional Highlights

  • Community-wide Discovery Process

    Through 15+ focus groups, comprehensive surveys with over 600 participants, and stakeholder workshops—we ensured every voice helped shape the new digital experience.

  • Guided CMS selection

    Craft CMS was chosen and paired with governance guidance designed to balance institutional standards with departmental flexibility for long-term content excellence.

  • Scalable UI system

    An evolution of Pentagram's brand identity work, ensuring visual consistency across all digital touchpoints while accommodating diverse content needs.

  • MyWellesley intranet overhaul

    Streamlined internal communications by clearly distinguishing public-facing content from internal resources.

Project Scope

  • Discovery
  • Content Audit
  • On Campus Visit
  • Project Strategy
  • Content Strategy
  • Governance Strategy
  • CMS Selection Support
  • User Testing
  • Concept Design
  • System Design
  • Front-end Dev
  • Back-end Dev (Craft CMS)
  • Content Planning & Migration

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