Norwalk Community College: Aligning Stakeholders, UX and Technology Across a Complex Digital Transformation

A website project that was really an organizational alignment project.

The new NCC website needed to serve prospective students, current students, faculty, staff and community audiences while giving individual academic departments enough flexibility to communicate their own programs and priorities.

Vertical Insite led the client-facing strategy, stakeholder communication, user experience and technical coordination. The work connected a 10-person institutional oversight group and academic stakeholders with an India-based development team and a separate Salesforce vendor partner—turning many different needs, opinions and technical requirements into one cohesive digital experience.

Creating clarity inside a complex institution.

A college website is rarely owned by one person or one department. NCC needed a solution that could support institution-wide goals while respecting the needs of academic departments, enrollment teams, leadership and the people responsible for maintaining the site after launch.

The project had to address several challenges at the same time:

• Bring multiple stakeholder perspectives into a workable decision-making process.
• Improve navigation and information flow for very different user audiences.
• Create a consistent institutional experience without making every department look or function exactly the same.
• Translate nontechnical stakeholder needs into clear UX and development direction.
• Connect the website with Salesforce forms and lead-tracking workflows used in the college's recruitment process.
• Coordinate work across internal stakeholders, an offshore development team and an outside Salesforce vendor.
• Build a system staff and department leaders could confidently manage after launch.

Giving people a way to see the solution before asking them to approve it.

Academic stakeholders understood their programs deeply, but they were not expected to think like UX designers or developers. Rather than asking them to react to technical specifications, Vertical Insite created visual wireframes and user-flow concepts that made the proposed experience tangible.

Those wireframes became a shared language. Stakeholders could see how content would be organized, how users would move through the site, and how departmental needs would fit within the broader college experience. Feedback could then be gathered around something concrete instead of abstract technical language.

Designing the system before designing the pages.

The UX process focused on the complete experience: information architecture, navigation, user flows, page relationships and flexible content structures for individual departments.

Vertical Insite created wireframes for stakeholder review and then developed the UX direction used by the development team. The goal was to create enough structure for consistency and usability while leaving room for different departments to communicate in ways appropriate to their audiences.

Connecting the client, Salesforce partner and development team.

NCC's Salesforce environment was managed by a vendor partner. Vertical Insite did not build the Salesforce system itself; our role was to coordinate how that functionality would become part of the public website experience.

Salesforce forms and lead-tracking functionality were styled and integrated throughout the site using APIs, plugins and, where needed, custom code or scripts. That required understanding enough of the technical environment to communicate clearly with both the Salesforce partner and the development team, while keeping the client focused on the business and user outcomes.

Turning strategy into a flexible, maintainable digital system.

Once stakeholder direction and UX were established, Vertical Insite worked closely with the development team through implementation—clarifying requirements, reviewing functionality, providing UX direction, coordinating feedback and helping resolve the questions that emerge when a large digital system moves from concept to working product.

Departmental page structures were designed to feel connected to the NCC brand while allowing different academic areas to present their information appropriately. The project also included search and navigation considerations, responsive behavior and the integration of recruitment-related Salesforce workflows.

The relationship between strategy and implementation remained continuous: decisions made during development were evaluated against the original user needs and institutional goals rather than treated as isolated technical choices.

Building confidence after launch—not dependency.

A successful institutional website also needs people inside the organization who know how to use it. Vertical Insite trained staff and department leaders to update content and build within the new page system so the website could remain useful and current after launch.

The project also supported a broader effort to strengthen NCC’s identity. During the website work, Vertical Insite developed the #NCCProud message as a way to create a more unified expression of school pride and connection. Although the concept initially met with resistance from some stakeholders, it gained the support of the college President and was ultimately adopted across the website, campus and marketing materials — including the annual report and other institutional communications.

A clearer digital experience backed by stronger internal alignment.

The completed site gave NCC a more modern, responsive and structured digital presence, but the larger value was the system behind it: stakeholders had a clearer framework for decision-making, academic departments had usable content structures, recruitment workflows connected into the web experience, and staff had the tools and training needed to maintain the site.

For Vertical Insite, the project is a strong example of client solutions work at the intersection of relationship management, UX, technical translation and implementation—helping different groups with different expertise move toward one successful outcome.