5° + Malone University
Website
The Opportunity
Located in northeastern Ohio, Malone University is deeply committed to preparing students for lives of Christian service. As the university looked to grow enrollment among key prospective student groups, leaders saw an opportunity to reimagine how the website could inspire, inform and convert. With a new university president in place and fresh vision for the future, the University Relations team set out to build a more powerful, flexible platform—an updated site that could elevate Malone’s story for years to come.
IMPLEMENTING EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS
Malone University partnered with 5° to not only redesign their website, but also to move the site from a CMS with significant limitations to the Wordpress environment. Since it had been several years of adding onto an old site, the team at Malone committed to a thorough discovery process.
The redesigned Malone website set out to:
Improve site-wide navigation and create clearer, more intuitive paths to academic program pages
Expand content around distinctive and innovative academic programs
Resolve circular site pathways that prevented users from completing key actions
Unify messaging that reflects Malone’s Christian mission
Streamline and structure feature stories using a category-driven taxonomy
Elevate the visual experience across the entire site
“We’ve gone through the website redesign process three times at Malone and 5 Degrees was, by far, the most attentive. Figma templates showed us how broad/condensed the content needed to be. They helped us visualize what was possible early and often. The guides they provided us for the content build set us up for success. In the end, 5 Degrees solved everything we needed in reasonable time and with extraordinary patience.”
— Connie Boring | Director of University Relations
A SUSTAINABLE SYSTEM
A secondary—but important—focus of the project was establishing sustainable, long-term governance. At 5°, we often say that redesigns are not just opportunities to refresh the look of a site, but also to make it work better. With that in mind, new workflows and processes were developed to support ongoing content management and site operations.
The new block-based system gives the Malone team a flexible toolkit for structuring content and media across the site. Built-in on-page tools support ADA compliance and strengthen SEO efforts, while a simplified site architecture makes ongoing content management faster and more efficient.
