CIA | Website

Scope

Overview

Vital Design partnered with the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) to create a newly branded, easy-to-manage website on WordPress. The new website needed to showcase CIA as the top culinary institute while highlighting the traditional college experience it offers to its students.

Menu Options

The primary objectives of this project included:

Creating a fun, easy-to-navigate site that resonates with the undergraduate audience
Ensuring the new site reflects the CIA’s prestigious status as a highly accredited culinary school
Implementing CIA’s new branding throughout the site
Providing a backend that is easy for the CIA team to maintain and update

Digging In

For the first course, we conducted extensive interviews with the CIA team to understand their unique differentiators and goals for the new website. This enabled us to create design mockups that embodied CIA’s new branding and mission while centering the engaging user experience.

Our development team built the site on WordPress (our favorite CMS), which ensures ease of navigation and backend management. Meanwhile, our writing team helped refresh the outdated copy, and our designers tweaked the navigation elements to align with modern web standards and user expectations.

We worked closely with the CIA team throughout the entire process to ensure the new site met their needs and expectations.

Tough to Chew

Ahh, the higher education website CMS. A special breed of CMS that, to be fair, meets the unique needs of college and university websites, but doesn’t always play nicely with other platforms.

We had some difficulties integrating WordPress with the CIA’s other platform, Ellucian, due to lack of access. But the Vital team is nothing if not resourceful, and, equipped with our vast knowledge of WordPress, we were able to find workarounds that allowed the CIA team to continue using Ellucian where necessary without compromising the rest of the new site.

When it came to telling the CIA’s brand story, we needed to strike a careful balance between presenting the school as both a top culinary institute and a place for a traditional college experience. To wrap our brains around exactly what that balance needed to look like, our brand and copywriting teams conducted many interviews with the CIA team to gain a deeper understanding of their school’s (and students’) needs, wants, and unique differentiators.

Palate Cleanser

By leveraging our team’s expertise and close collaboration with the CIA, we delivered a website that not only met but exceeded the client’s expectations, enhancing their digital presence and making site management a breeze for the CIA team