Circuit Stream · 2024-2025
Rebuilding website for brand, scale and growth
Design Strategy
Systems Design
Brand
A ground-up rebuild of Circuit Stream’s website, anchored on optimizing performance, scaling our systems, and realigning the brand around our university partnerships and growth.
My role
Brand, Product Designer, Systems Designer, Framer Developer
Timeline
6 months
Context
Circuit Stream built its reputation in XR and gaming education, but as the business grew, our model shifted. We started partnering with universities to deliver programs in industries and skills beyond XR, and these partnerships quickly became central to how we operated.
As a small team, most of our energy was going into designing, launching, and maintaining partner websites. Each partnership had its own audience, brand requirements, and positioning, which meant we needed to move quickly and adapt often.
Meanwhile, our own website was falling behind. It was still telling the story of Circuit Stream as “just” an XR school, and the way it was built — with custom code — made it expensive, slow, and clunky to maintain.
Problem and goals
Outdated positioning
Our website no longer reflected the business we’d become. It didn’t highlight our university partnerships or the credibility we’d built across new markets. This misalignment weakened trust and made the site feel secondary to the real work we were doing.
Our goal was to realign positioning so the website reinforces trust in our brand and connects back to the credibility of our partnerships.
Costly and clunky systems
Our site was built with custom code and a CMS that wasn’t flexible enough to manage or scale. Every update was a heavy lift, and costs to maintain it kept rising. As we added more partnerships, this setup became harder and harder to justify.
Our goal was to simplify our systems, lower costs, and empower design and marketing to make changes directly without relying on engineering, while ensuring consistency in our visual language.
Slow to adapt
Our partnerships brought us into very different markets, each with unique audiences and messaging needs. But the way our site was set up made iteration difficult. Testing new positioning, launching updates, or tailoring pages for different audiences became repetitive and resource-heavy, slowing down growth.
Our goal was to build a system that could adapt to different markets, support faster iteration, and allow us to test and evolve our messaging as we grew.
Solution
To solve these problems, we knew we couldn’t just update the visuals, we had to rethink the foundation. The website needed to scale across partner and CS sites, lower costs, and better represent our brand.
We approached it in layers: first defining the brand story we wanted to tell, then building systems and frameworks to scale it, and finally optimizing analytics and infrastructure to sustain it.
Rethinking the brand first
Before touching systems, we had to step back and ask: what should the Circuit Stream website stand for now?
We realized that our partnerships with universities were our strongest credibility lever, yet our site didn't surfaced them.
As an education company, learning outcomes were the real differentiator. We weren’t just teaching theory; we were connecting learners to projects and real results, and that needed to come through clearly.
At the same time, our north star was about future-facing skills for all ages. We weren’t just an XR school anymore, we were preparing learners for what’s next and bridging those skills directly to industry.
So the challenge became: how do we bring all of this together? We needed to use partnerships to signal credibility, make intimidating skills feel approachable and trustworthy, and layer in a modern edge so the brand didn’t feel outdated. That combination became the lens for everything we designed afterward.
Building systems that could scale
With the brand lens in place, the next challenge was scale: how do we support multiple university sites and our own brand without fragmenting the design system or duplicating effort?
We built a design system with theming variables that defined typography, color, spacing, and hierarchy. Core components stayed consistent, while themes could be applied to create distinct visual expressions for each partner: swapping fonts, adjusting colors, or layering in branding nuances.
This gave us both consistency and adaptability: shared components were reused across partnerships, while theming handled customization. As a result, we could scale new university sites without rebuilding from scratch, while maintaining a unified design language.
For Circuit Stream itself, we pushed the system further. Because partner sites were whitelabeled, our own brand needed to stand apart. We elevated the CS site with richer storytelling, modern visuals, and credibility signals — ensuring it felt differentiated while still rooted in the same scalable foundation.
Templates, templates, templates!
Once the foundations were in place, the next unlock was speed. I rebuilt the entire Circuit Stream website from zero using a template-driven approach in Framer.
Templates acted like a lightweight CMS: they gave marketing a reliable starting point, ensured consistency across a massive site, and cut the time it took to launch new pages.
For partners, templates meant faster rollouts with less engineering overhead. For Circuit Stream, they gave us the structure to elevate our own brand with stronger storytelling and visuals, while keeping everything tied to the same scalable foundation.
Performance and optimization
Rebuilding the site from scratch also gave us the chance to clean up long-standing debt around performance and measurement.
The old site was painfully slow and poorly structured, with messy URLs that made it hard to track engagement. Performance scores sat at 10/100, and SEO scores were at 62/100. After the rebuild, we lifted performance to 80/100 and SEO to 92/100, while also bringing accessibility in line with WCAG standards.
We also cleaned up the URL structure and instrumented key user journeys with analytics and event tracking. This gave us visibility into where leads dropped off, and created re-engagement opportunities for marketing and enrollment teams.
Outcomes
This project was never just a “website redesign.” It was about rebuilding the foundation of how Circuit Stream presents itself and scales operationally as the business continued to grow.
We went from a slow, outdated, inconsistent site built several years ago, with poor performance, messy URLs, no instrumentation, and a brand story stuck in our XR roots — to a modern, scalable platform that:
Repositioned our brand around credibility, partnerships, and future-facing skills.
Introduced systems and templates that let us manage both our own site and partner sites at scale
We improved site performance by 700%, lifted SEO by over 50%, and cut infrastructure costs by 87% through a full AWS audit and migration.
Instrumented key funnels, giving us visibility into the learner journey and creating levers for growth.
