Bringing art class registration home — accessibly
Marwen’s new site moved course registration onto its own website for the first time, integrated directly with its student database, and was designed from day one for every young artist, including those with disabilities.
The story
The Challenge
Marwen’s site ran on an outdated CMS that only a programmer could update, and it was failing the very audiences it existed for. Accessibility fell short (poor contrast among other issues), bilingual support was weak despite a large Spanish-speaking community, key actions like donating weren’t prominent, and resources were hard to find. Most critically, course registration, the heart of Marwen’s relationship with students and families, lived entirely off the website, in a workflow tied to a legacy FileMaker Pro database. A redesign planned during the pandemic had been deferred for years; the gap between Marwen’s programs and Marwen’s website kept growing.
Our Approach
The strategic insight: build the site around the student journey, and make the hardest thing — registration — native to it. We ran a full UX process, Marwen’s first ever built on real user personas, deliberately including personas with color blindness, partial hearing loss, and dyslexia, since Marwen’s audience is young people and accessibility was a top selection criterion for the project. We then designed and developed a nine-template site anchored by a student portal with a custom-built registration flow integrated directly with Marwen’s FileMaker Pro database, our first direct integration with that system. Students can browse courses, submit preferences, and see their enrollments without leaving the site.
Why It Worked
When your mission is access, your website has to practice it. We designed for the students least served by the old site, and we refused to leave registration stranded in a separate system. That turned Marwen’s website from a barrier into part of the program.
The Results
Course registration on Marwen’s own website for the first time, connected live to the student database
An experience designed and tested against personas with visual, hearing, and learning disabilities
Student artwork front and center through a fast-loading, high-quality galleries directory
A back end Marwen’s team can update without a programmer
Everything a young artist needs, in one place.
Around the portal we built a searchable course directory, a full events calendar, a custom storefront for student-made greeting cards, and an embedded DonorBox giving experience with the prominent donate pathway the old site lacked.
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