Prepared for Berkeley City College
Prepared for Berkeley City College
Two design directions for the new Berkeley City College homepage — one signature, one classic — built on the college's 2025 brand guidelines, the new BCC West building, and a ground-up audit of the current site. Review both, compare against today's homepage, and see exactly what changed and why.
BCC West opens on scroll to unveil "Where will you go next?" — cinematic motion, live Instagram and PeraltaTV media rows, animated proof of BCC's transfer story. Built to win national higher-ed design recognition.
View Concept A →A calm, familiar structure in step with the Peralta family of sites — clean full-width hero, program communities, student stories, verified stats — executed with the same brand system, content strategy, and accessibility bar. Easy to maintain, no learning curve.
View Concept B →The current berkeleycitycollege.edu homepage, for side-by-side comparison. The audit beneath details what we measured on it — from missing alt text to a 149-request payload — and how each concept resolves it.
Open current site →Every claim below comes from a measured audit of the live site (July 2026) — not opinion. Full audit and rebuild playbook available on request.
Five stacked bars compete before any content; auto-rotating carousel with text baked into images; four equally weighted CTAs mixing summer hours with Apply; no design system — five typefaces, two magentas, a brown footer.
One clear story per scroll: a cinematic building reveal (Concept A) or a calm full-width hero (Concept B); a single primary action — Enroll — with a tour as secondary; one brand-true design system: Dacnis teal, Gold Finch, Myriad, applied by the 60-30-10 rule from BCC's own guidelines.
Event flyers as hero slides and news thumbnails; clip-art icons for academic communities; the new $60M BCC West building absent from the homepage.
BCC West as the visual anchor; real photography from the college's brand library; custom scene imagery for each Academic & Career Community; every news card carries a real image.
Title tag reads "Berkeley City College Homepage"; the 6× Transfer Champion recognition buried mid-page as plain text; no admit-rate, equity, or designation proof anywhere.
"Envision. Engage. Excel." leads; proof points surfaced with intent: Top 5 in CA for UC Berkeley admits, 83% to all UCs, 6× Transfer Champion, 4× Equity Champion, BSI · HSI · AANAPISI, 1,306 awards — each sourced before publication.
Empty "Campus Events" section shipped live; Instagram embed renders as a blank panel; counseling help lives on a dense subpage; BCC's own virtual tour sits unfound on a shared YouTube channel.
Feeds render only when they have content; latest Instagram posts and PeraltaTV's BCC videos embedded with lazy click-to-play; counseling booking, drop-in times, and contact surfaced on the homepage; the virtual tour one click from arrival.
9 of 26 images missing alt text; heading order broken (H2s before a mid-page H1); emoji inside headings; text trapped in carousel images — measurable WCAG failures with the ADA Title II deadline of April 26, 2027 approaching.
Semantic structure with one H1 and strict heading order; alt text everywhere; all text is real HTML; every animation honors reduced-motion; contrast-checked color pairs — built to the WCAG 2.1 AA bar the DOJ and Chancellor's Office require.
149 requests, 46 external scripts, 8 iframes on load; zero structured data; a 30-character title tag with no keywords.
Lean single-page payloads with lazy, on-demand embeds; keyword-complete metadata and EducationalOrganization schema planned in build; performance budget: ≤40 requests, LCP under 2.5s on the production HubSpot theme.
Open each concept full-screen and scroll top to bottom — Concept A rewards a slow scroll. Both are working prototypes: buttons, hovers, videos, and Instagram are live. Statistics shown are drawn from college presentations and will be verified with the research office before anything publishes.