Background
High School Equivalency (HSE) company HiSET provides a pathway to obtaining a high school equivalency credential with their exams. With a mission to expand educational access and opportunity, their website was used to communicate with and engage test takers, recruiters, and advocates.
After their parent company rebranded, a better website became a priority. They sought a partner to help them shift to a new CMS, rebuild their site in alignment with new brand standards, and improve overall site performance—so they came back to Solid Digital, who had assisted with the PSI Exams rebrand and website. Having worked together before, the established trust helped streamline the shorter timeline, from start to finish.
Approach
Created by parent companies ETS and PSI Exams, the HiSET exam is both flexible and accessible for non-traditional students, but the website lacked that same flexibility and accessibility. For this project, Solid Digital’s team worked closely with the HiSET team, especially Global Website Manager Megan Gaffney, to create a scope and timeline that fit with the smaller website’s needs.
HiSET’s team provided copy, and the newly established branding guidelines from their parent company helped tighten up the approach and timeline, as well.
Creative Approach
With newly established brand guidelines, every HiSET website design choice needed to be filtered through the parent brand’s new look and feel. Paired with this, the page design flows were targeted for improvement, requiring both skimmability and simplification. Additionally, for ease of future in-house content changes and additions, Solid Digital’s team planned to craft templates and create specific image guidance.
Technical Approach
With the site’s new CMS, there was plenty of work planned for the backend—from content migration to developing specialty search filters. Transitioning the site to Elementor would also require new scaffolding and setting up redirects.
Bringing in Solid Digital, HiSET was on a path to make web updates easier with a new CMS, align their site with ETS’ new direction, and improve their website performance, all at the same time. With a flexible, future-proofed site, HiSET’s team could focus on helping expand access to the exam for their target demographics.
Strategy
The full strategy was simpler for this return client on a tight timeline, but the results required (and resulted in) the same amount of success. In order to broaden their reach, HiSET’s upgraded web platform and redesign had to make their content updates simpler and more straightforward.
Solid Digital and HiSET worked together to accomplish the following in support of the rebuilt site:
- Content Migration: Both teams moved PDF downloads and more from the old site to the new
- Site Hierarchy: Solid Digital’s design team helped create scannable text with improved accordion sections and intuitive layouts
- Page Speed: Solid Digital’s developers helped boost several pages from a speed of 74 to 90+
- Accessibility: Color changes were made to help improve contrast and readability to make the site fully accessible
- Visual Guidance: Solid Digital helped define imagery use with templates and guidelines
Process
After one round of revisions, Solid Digital went on to build out the new site on Elementor. Taking the copy from HiSET, Solid Digital went from there, making UX improvements and suggestions on hierarchy throughout the site.
On the Resources page, Solid Digital’s design team took long accordion lists, and helped different audiences navigate to precisely where they needed to go, whether they were test takers, educators, or hiring managers. With an improved structure and clearer organization, website users now have a better experience, and the site’s Google ranking can improve.
To keep on brand, HiSET’s signature orange was kept front and center, and better page design flows allowed content to be more easily located and read. The design and development teams worked hand-in-hand to ensure simple content management and improved site performance overall.
The imagery was a group effort—Solid Digital helped define how imagery should be used within the site, by providing templates and sizing guidelines. Because the site would be accessed by mobile as well as on desktops and tablets, responsiveness was checked at each stage, and “safe zones” were established for hero images to ensure that anytime an image appeared—on any kind of screen—it would look its best.
One page that was particularly appreciated was the HiSET account creation page. Accompanied by screenshots, step-by-step instructions and a tiny explainer video, it makes the process much easier for registrants.
The Challenges
Not many challenges were noted in this project, thanks to an already established working relationship and a more streamlined website build. Megan at HiSET helped with team buy-in, and the atypical (and shorter) project process was tailored to their timeline and budget.
Transparency around scope and capabilities helped mitigate any concerns that came up after initial template designs, and a few items were placed in the “Phase 2” bucket for future needs to keep everything moving.
Other minimal challenges included deeply nested content that caused some website page performance issues. After Solid came up with different content organization solutions, including hierarchy for the state testing requirement pages, for example, the pages became less overloaded.
The Results
The final website was completed more than a week before the set deadline, and HiSET’s team is extremely pleased with the results. In fact, shortly after the HiSET site was completed, they reached back out to ask for help to visually refresh a few PSI Exam pages.
HiSET’s rebuilt site can further their positive impact on businesses and communities, just by being more accessible, better branded, and more easily edited. Put HiSET to the test for yourself.
