Warren Wilson College
Building a digital home worthy of one of the country’s most distinctive colleges.
Warren Wilson College sits on 1,135 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains just outside Asheville, North Carolina. One of only nine federally designated work colleges in the United States, Warren Wilson runs a fully operational farm, gardens, and forests, all tended by students. Sustainability is a way of life here.
With a student body that’s over 60% LGBTQIA+ and a culture built around hands-on learning, social justice, and environmental stewardship, Warren Wilson has a story unlike anyone else’s in higher education. Our challenge wasn’t finding what made them special. It was building a website as unique, quirky and charming as Warren Wilson.
Warren Wilson came to Big Sea with urgency and a clear sense of purpose. Under the leadership of a new president and guided by a fresh five-year strategic framework, the college was ready to invest in a digital presence that could serve immediate recruitment needs and lay the groundwork for real, sustainable enrollment growth.
Our specific objectives were to:
Move fast by launching the homepage and navigation first before building in iterative phases, focusing on high-impact content areas.
Reflect Warren Wilson’s current and aspirational student population with authentic, vibrant design and copy that speaks directly to the students the college is built for.
Showcase what makes Warren Wilson genuinely unique: the working farm, the crew-based work program, the tight-knit community, and a mission grounded in radical inclusivity and learning in action.
Design and develop a modular, flexible WordPress system that staff could maintain and grow without requiring a developer for every little update.
Support enrollment growth by prioritizing undergraduate recruitment while building something flexible enough to support new graduate-level programs.
The Problem
A site that undersold an extraordinary institution
Warren Wilson’s website wasn’t doing the college justice. The design felt dated and generic, a poor reflection of a campus that’s anything but. The layout and imagery failed to communicate the energy, the values, or the lived experience of being a Warren Wilson student. Stakeholders across the institution said as much: the site didn’t reflect the current vibe of the students, the location, or the direction the college was heading. One put it plainly: Warren Wilson was a “best kept secret,” and not by choice.
WordPress FTW
A CMS that made updates a chore
The existing site was built on a framework that made routine content updates difficult and time-consuming for a small, stretched internal team. Administrators couldn’t build new pages or modify existing ones without pulling in a developer. When the team once tried to add alumni profiles to the site, they had to commission an entirely new template from an outside contractor. The cost and friction of maintaining their own website had become a real barrier to growth.
Real enrollment stakes
Warren Wilson wasn’t pursuing a redesign for aesthetic reasons. Undergraduate recruitment is the college’s primary financial driver, and leadership had set a clear enrollment growth goal. With a new Master of Applied Climate Studies (MACS) program launching in Fall 2025 and graduate recruitment beginning that summer, they also needed a fast, targeted solution for lead generation alongside the full homepage overhaul.
The strategy
Begin with curiosity
Before a single wireframe took shape, we went deep. We surveyed faculty, admissions staff, marketing leads, and web operations team members, gathering perspectives from across the institution on who Warren Wilson is, who it’s for, and what the website was failing to say. Our Wayfinding Workshop followed, where we reviewed competitor sites, audited existing homepage content, and mapped out what prospective students most needed to find and feel when they landed on the site.
The picture that emerged was consistent: prospects needed to understand Warren Wilson’s experiential learning model, feel the pull of the mountain campus and its proximity to Asheville, and encounter a community that felt genuinely welcoming.
Clear Information Architecture
Whenever we build a university website, information architecture sets the tone for the entire project. It’s delicate work balancing competing priorities, siloed departments, and a daunting amount of content. Our Content and Brand Director developed strategic recommendations that streamlined and organized the site’s primary navigation without introducing unnecessary complexity.
Copy Worthy of Attention
Working closely with Warren Wilson’s internal team and bringing a fresh outside perspective, we developed homepage copy that traded institutional formality for approachable language. The hero opens with a question: Who will you become without limits? Each section is written to resonate with students who’ve always felt a little too big for the boxes they’ve been handed.
Custom Illustrations Rooted in Place
To honor the magnetic pull of Warren Wilson’s campus, our design team created a series of custom botanical illustrations featuring plants native to the mountains of Western North Carolina. Woven throughout the site, these illustrations do what stock photography never could: they root the design in the specific, irreplaceable landscape where Warren Wilson students live and learn. The result feels handcrafted and distinctly local, a visual identity that couldn’t belong to any other institution.
A design system built for the long haul
We designed a modular component system, giving the internal team the ability to create, update, and reorganize content without a developer in the room. The design leaned into the natural, earthy character of the campus while opening up the secondary brand palette for more vibrancy and warmth. Large typography, organic shapes, and dynamic content sections gave the site energy without sacrificing accessibility or ease of use.
Responsive, timely collaboration
During a phased project, we spend far more time with clients than usual. We became an extension of Warren Wilson’s communications and marketing team, meeting weekly to not only update the team on our progress, but to provide a platform for team members to share their website needs. As a result, we nimbly adjusted designs and features to respond directly to ongoing and evolving communications needs.
The RESULT
Warren Wilson College’s new website is an immersive experience that draws in not only prospective students, but the parents who will likely be a large part of helping them choose the right higher education destination. (And probably foot at least part of the bill!) Abundant imagery and video, vibrant copy, and improved information architecture work in tandem to get website users where they need to go, and help them make one of the most important decisions of their lives.
