Rocky Mountain College

Their site content and structure was working against them, not for them. Today, their strategy and governance is on point.

Rocky Mountain College (RMC), founded in 1878 as Montana’s first institution of higher education, serves nearly 900 undergraduate and postgraduate students.  

College leadership approached Stamats expressing several key website challenges. The site was not optimized for mobile devices, featured a main menu that was extensive and difficult to use, and did not function well as a marketing or recruitment tool. 

Over the years, modifications to RMC’s brand had not been translated online. As a result, the institution’s website seemed jarring, slightly foreign, and detrimental to the level of brand engagement the college was hoping to achieve. 

All improvements would need to seamlessly integrate Rocky Mountain College’s well-established brand identity into the overall site experience. 

Our partnership with RMC focused on a comprehensive website redesign. The work plan included: 

  • Crafting a clearer website strategy 
  • Developing well-organized information architecture 
  • Establishing a governance strategy to guide all content creation 

To accurately capture and convey the RMC brand, our web team visited campus to interview key audiencescurrent and prospective students, parents, community partners, and other influencers.  

This foundational work not only allowed us to tell the RMC story more clearly, it helped us understand specific brand communication challenges that the site needed to overcome. Further, it inspired innovative site redesign options for RMC leadership to choose from. 

The project involved multiple facets of collaboration, including extensive research and discovery, content strategy, architecture and wireframes, usability testing, content management system (CMS) build-out and integration, and quality assurance testing. 

We also worked closely with RMC stakeholders to establish performance metrics that: 

  • Took measurements to quantify the site’s efficiency 
  • Uncovered areas for future improvements 
  • Identified journey paths and clarified how the site is being used by multiple audiences 

This project combined the vision of RMC leadership and talents of Stamats’ website developers, user experience, experts, writers, designers, and project managers. The revitalized website debuted to rave reviews from both internal and external audiences. 

  • The Challenge

    Rocky Mountain College (RMC), founded in 1878 as Montana’s first institution of higher education, serves nearly 900 undergraduate and postgraduate students.  

    College leadership approached Stamats expressing several key website challenges. The site was not optimized for mobile devices, featured a main menu that was extensive and difficult to use, and did not function well as a marketing or recruitment tool. 

    Over the years, modifications to RMC’s brand had not been translated online. As a result, the institution’s website seemed jarring, slightly foreign, and detrimental to the level of brand engagement the college was hoping to achieve. 

    All improvements would need to seamlessly integrate Rocky Mountain College’s well-established brand identity into the overall site experience. 

  • The Project

    Our partnership with RMC focused on a comprehensive website redesign. The work plan included: 

    • Crafting a clearer website strategy 
    • Developing well-organized information architecture 
    • Establishing a governance strategy to guide all content creation 

    To accurately capture and convey the RMC brand, our web team visited campus to interview key audiencescurrent and prospective students, parents, community partners, and other influencers.  

    This foundational work not only allowed us to tell the RMC story more clearly, it helped us understand specific brand communication challenges that the site needed to overcome. Further, it inspired innovative site redesign options for RMC leadership to choose from. 

    The project involved multiple facets of collaboration, including extensive research and discovery, content strategy, architecture and wireframes, usability testing, content management system (CMS) build-out and integration, and quality assurance testing. 

    We also worked closely with RMC stakeholders to establish performance metrics that: 

    • Took measurements to quantify the site’s efficiency 
    • Uncovered areas for future improvements 
    • Identified journey paths and clarified how the site is being used by multiple audiences 
  • The Results

    This project combined the vision of RMC leadership and talents of Stamats’ website developers, user experience, experts, writers, designers, and project managers. The revitalized website debuted to rave reviews from both internal and external audiences.