The King's University

Connecting with a young and tech savvy audience.


About the Client

The King’s University offers quality Christian education with fully accredited Bachelor degrees in the arts, humanities, music, social sciences, natural sciences and commerce/management, as well as an education after degree.

About the Project

We have been working with The King’s University for four years now. Our first project with the University in the fall of 2012 was awarded an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Interactive Media Council and also a Gold Award from the international MarCom Awards. The online standard had been set. In 2014 we built another website for the University as they had new brand guidelines in place. And in the summer of 2016 we launched another bigger, better website that was the result of President, Dr. Melanie Humphrey’s drive to position the University as a leading Christian institution.

In 2016, our team tirelessly researched, planned, and conducted a variety of stakeholder focus groups to ensure that we were building a website that truly fit the needs of all faculties and ensured alignment with the University's five year plan. We developed new guidelines for King’s photography to ensure that branding was consistent and that the new website would have great, high-res imagery.

For the design of the website, we chose to move towards a clean and institutional look; ample use of white space, tasteful animations, and unique landing pages. Content and analytics research played a large role in the design - with each landing page being designed in a way which visually enhanced important pieces of information, we needed to make sure that the messages were concise and strategic.

When you land on the homepage for www.kingsu.ca you immediately see the core message of The King’s University “...a faith-based institution where purpose and academics unite.” As King’s is now the only Christian University in Edmonton, highlighting this foundation was essential not only for prospective students to see, but also donors, family members, and staff. As you move down through the homepage there are content tiles for King’s to show off their academics and other relevant featured items. This overall layout helps King’s to show that they are a serious academic institution and places their online presence to the same caliber as other leading non-Christian institutions.

There are some awesome functionalities in place for this website that make the site super easy to use for administrators and visitors alike. Features include:

    • Integrated Staff and Department Directory: This allows all faculty to have bio pages that are searchable via the main directory and also pulled on to each respective Faculty page. Individuals in this directory can also be tagged to specific services so that their contact information is pulled to relevant pages (such as “Student Life”).
    • Blogs: The University has a number of blogs throughout the website. These are searchable and filterable by topic.
    • Form Builder: Administrators can easily build forms and place them on pages throughout the site. For a site like King’s, with various departments, initiatives, and administrators, being able to add forms with all kinds of fields and contacts has become essential.
    • Custom Snippets: Throughout the website you will see distinct content areas that aren’t typical article content. These include all the tiles you see throughout the website, enticers, calls to action, etc. In particular, the Academics section of the website required a number of snippets to be developed to accommodate and organize all the information. By understanding the needs of the University and the needs of those actually using the website, our team was able to identify these unique content areas.

For King’s, ensuring that the site was designed with a clear purpose was critical. The number one priority for the website is conversions - getting new students through the door.

Over the years, we have become partners with the University as their Agency of Record. We work very closely with the Marketing and Communications department on a weekly basis for website enhancements, PPC Campaigns, Search Engine Optimization, print advertising needs, photography, strategy, and everything in between!


About Box Clever

Box Clever is an Edmonton web design company focused on long lasting relationships and innovative website design and development.