Mays Growth Partners
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Berkeley City College · Higher educationBerkeley City College: fifty years of history, thousands of students, and a website that had drifted far from both. This is an inside look at an engagement in progress, with the redesign preview live now.
Berkeley City College is a public community college in the heart of downtown Berkeley with a record most universities would envy: nationally recognized transfer outcomes, award-winning equity work, and more than a hundred programs and certificates.
Their website is where nearly every future student first meets them. And that first meeting wasn't going well.
The site had been migrated between platforms, absorbed into a multi-college template, and reshaped by years of well-meaning internal requests. The result is familiar to anyone in higher ed: a homepage where everything is important, so nothing is. The three things a future student actually comes to do, explore programs, enroll, and see whether people like them succeed there, were buried under everything else.
And the clock is ticking for every public institution: new federal ADA Title II rules require public colleges' web content to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards by April 2027. Compliance isn't optional, and retrofitting an aging template is harder than designing accessibility in from the start.
We started the way we always do: diagnose before designing. A full homepage audit documented every issue, from accessibility gaps to buried calls to action, in a prioritized fix list the college's team could act on immediately, with or without us.
Then, two complete design concepts, built as live working previews rather than static mockups: one expressive, one built around radical simplicity and accessibility. Working previews mean feedback becomes visible change within days, not weeks. We also prepared a web design-principles guide the college can use to keep future internal requests from eroding the design again, because a redesign without governance is just a countdown to the next redesign.
The direction we're building toward: a homepage built around the student's three questions, with the college's real proof points doing the persuading, and accessibility engineered in ahead of the federal deadline rather than patched in after it. The preview is live below, and the engagement is in progress.
View the live redesign preview
Institutions don't hire vendors for redesigns like this. They trust partners with their front door.
Whether you're a Main Street shop or an institution, the process is the same: diagnose, design, build, grow. Make us an offer on your website, or start with a free strategy session.