Attract More Students with a Stunning Virtual Campus Tour Design

 What is good y'all? John D Saunders here. You know, the vibes!

In today's video, I'm talking about educational websites and how you can stand out from the crowd by creating an amazing virtual presence online to create a virtual tour that people would love to check out and join your open house for your upcoming school, whether that's elementary, middle school, college level or collegiate or high school. So let's just jump in. Let's do this. And we're going to show you real life examples of how we've done this with our clients here at 5Four. Let's dive in. 

So I do want to talk a little bit about the example here. We're just going to call them really cool school in New York. This is a brand new school that's coming to Queens that focuses on the medical field. And so what we did was we created a website that was conducive to all of that. One, we piggyback off of their partnerships. We looked at their partnership logos, reference points. design, brand identity, and systems. And we correlate that into the overall design look and feel. We wanted this to feel a level of continuity between their brand and this new school that was opening up.

So the first thing that we did was we took all their archival footage that they have for any events, workshops, or things that they did. Keep in mind, they were looking to recruit middle schoolers going into high school that were looking to focus on the medical field for their careers so they could earn college credits in high school.

They could get the experience and know how to traverse and travel and move through this system as they got older. And so what we wanted to do was piggyback off of their medical partnership with the correlation of logos, designs, and brand assets. Also, one important piece of this is they have to see what this looks like.

Students and parents alike need to know what that experience looks like as soon as they come to the site. So what we did at the top of that website was we put archival footage of the students in workshops, them interacting as students with their peers, as well as professors, as well as experts coming in to talk to the students.

We need to convey that in less than 20 seconds. Because you usually get about eight or nine seconds before people start to scroll and check out the rest of the website. So we wanted to start there to really place emphasis on what was needed and what they were looking for. Then in the next sections, we talk about the specific pathways that that school provides.

So firstly, we show them what it looks like and then we show them what's possible in those pathways. This is going to help resonate and help create that consumer connection where parents that are looking to put their kids in a place will find confirmation. Then we piggyback on that again with images and visuals of what the student could look like in that place. You want to be able to see what your kids will look like in that position, what they'll look like in that school, and how they're going to navigate through the daily life of being a student at this school. 

Next up is accessibility. The site has to be accessible for any and everyone, whether they're on tablet, mobile or desktop. So what we did was we took the best break point, which is desktop. We looked at what folks and families are usually browsing on. It's about 70 percent desktop for this specific vertical. And so we worked on designing out that desktop wireframe first, then it trickled down to the other break points, tablet, mobile and we did that throughout the entire process.

Now making it as accessible means we added an additional layer where folks that need e-readers that need an audio correlation to be able to understand what's going on on that page. We need to make sure that students and parents from all walks of life can access that content and see what they're looking for and get what they need.

Lastly, this virtual tour piece is, you need a powerful call to action. So what we did was we set scarcity and we set limits to the specific open houses that they had for this upcoming school. We said there's a first come first serve, which is true. There's a set limit of how many people can join. And then we showed a real time ticker. To show how many folks were coming in and when that deadline was. 

This created urgency because we want to make sure that parents are ready for the next school year, that kids are prepped and ready to go. So we want to be proactive on our end by doing that. What that did was it gave them the ability to see what they need. Go ahead and make that decision and go through a very simple sign on process with that call to action. 

So if you want to create a virtual tour or a virtual landing page for your upcoming school or university, hit us up, drop a comment below, check out our recent work and I will see y'all next week.

Peace!