SMC digital viewbook

A print viewbook is reprinted every year and cannot ask the reader anything. In February 2019 MediaCross pitched colleges a digital one instead: a site connected to the admissions CRM, built for phones first, with something interactive in it, and sample viewbooks for two universities to show what that meant. By June, Spartanburg Methodist College had one underway, as part of a campaign called Make Big Moves that also had print viewbooks, a financial aid guide, postcards and email templates.

The college's prospective students read on phones, and the college wanted two things a book cannot do: make the search feel personal, and collect inquiries. Those two wants shaped every page.

I started with a flowchart and sitemap on one page. Six pages under a four-item navigation: home, academics that work, career development, campus living, Spartanburg, and financial aid, with three links out to the college's own site for clubs, visits and applications. Each page's sections are listed in order, and every page ends in the same Make the Move inquiry form.

Four numbered notes on the page say what the build would do. Inquiry forms would be embedded from the college's CRM. Personalized URLs would read a contact record and tailor the page to the student. Animations would fire at scroll waypoints: stat counters, fades, slides. And a scholarship calculator would answer from GPA, test scores and South Carolina residency once a student had introduced themselves.

The wireframes put the plan on eight pages at desktop width: the six pages, with the financial aid page drawn three times for the calculator's three states. The home page already has the dotted trail and the Two Paths, One Place diagram that carry the campaign; the pictures are placeholders.

The calculator is the one interactive section, and its order is the design decision. A student answers four questions: GPA, ACT, combined SAT, and whether they live in South Carolina. Then they introduce themselves, then get the answer: a scholarship they may qualify for, with Apply, Visit and Programs links under it. The answer is what the student came for; the introduction is what the college came for; the calculator puts the second before the first.

The design round set the type and the campaign's palette at iPhone 8 width: navy and cyan, the topographic texture, the dotted trail, photographs from the college, and section headings whose first letters carry a cyan highlight. The financial aid page puts the calculator on a navy panel so it reads as the page's one working part.

I built it as a React single-page app with client-side routing: six routes matching the sitemap, components for each page, the callouts, the calculator and the user form, scroll waypoints that trigger the counters and transitions, and Google Analytics. Each score field of the calculator offers I don't know this, so a student without scores still gets an answer. The source runs from July 29 to August 12, 2019; a Dockerfile dated August 6 copies the build onto the agency's nginx base image, the way the agency hosted every single-page app.

The personalized URLs from the plan are not in the source I kept, and the inquiry form in it is a client-side form with a sample record. How the shipped form posted to the CRM is not in my files.

The site shipped in 2019 and is still live. On October 22, 2026, makebigmoves.smcsc.edu served a React build with the same title, copy strings and analytics ID as the source I kept, from a newer build, so someone has rebuilt it since. The Internet Archive's captures run from November 11, 2019 to December 23, 2024.

MediaCross's public account of the engagement says the college's marketing lead called the viewbook the best the college had produced, and credits the campaign as a whole with the largest incoming class and the largest student body in the college's history, during the pandemic. The viewbook's share of that is not separated from the print, video and advertising on the same page, and no analytics export survives with me, so visits, inquiries and calculator completions are not counted here.

I would keep the analytics. The calculator was built to be measured, three steps with a form in the middle, and the one number that would have told the college what it bought, how many students reached the result, never left the agency's account. A copy of the export in the project folder would have made this page a different one.