Website Redesign: Centennial School District
The challenge
Serving five distinct communities, Centennial School District wanted a modern, updated website that better represents the district and makes it easier for families to engage with it. Rather than recreating their existing site, district leaders sought something entirely new — a clearer expression of their identity, an intuitive experience for users and a homepage where open enrollment was visible, accessible and strategically prioritized. As a district that draws students from within and outside its boundaries, Centennial needed a website that not only informed but inspired families to learn more, explore programs and ultimately choose Centennial.
Our approach
CESO Communications partnered closely with the district’s communications lead to build the new site from the ground up. The collaboration began with a community-wide survey to understand what families and staff turned to the website for and what improvements they hoped to see. These insights informed decisions around navigation, content structure and placement of key actions such as enrollment.
From there, our team worked alongside district stakeholders, including the superintendent, to develop a strategic plan for the site architecture. This included:
- Clarifying Centennial’s identity across its five communities and elevating that narrative within a refined “About Us” section.
- Designing a prominent enrollment pathway, including a large, visually impactful call-to-action button on the homepage to support the district’s open enrollment goals.
- Collaborative, capacity-building partnership: the district’s communication lead was a highly engaged partner, learning the platform alongside us and co-managing key elements of the build — a unique model that allowed Centennial to fully own their website following its launch.
A major visual strategy was to lean into photography as a storytelling tool. Working with a CESO photographer, we captured updated images from every campus to create a homepage that is 90% photography, putting real Centennial students and staff at the center of the design.
Our impact
The finished site launched with a clean, modern design that authentically reflects Centennial’s brand and identity. The photography-forward approach brought warmth and personality to the homepage, while the reorganized sitemap made the site significantly more intuitive for families, community members and staff.
While formal analytics were not yet available, the reactions from internal audiences were overwhelmingly positive. Leaders across departments praised the visual design, clearer structure and welcoming feel of the new site. Community feedback further affirmed that the district’s digital presence finally matched the quality of its schools and programs.
This project also became a turning point for CESO’s own web practice. Centennial’s redesign was one of the first major website builds our team completed from start to finish, establishing the strategic process and template we now use to guide website projects across the country. The steps developed during this collaboration — discovery, community input, architecture planning, brand alignment, visual storytelling and hands-on client partnership — have shaped every CESO website project since.
Services provided
2025
Community Engagement
Survey
Creative and Digital
including digital advertising, graphic design, logo design, photography, website redesign