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UI/UX Web Developer, Higher Ed

WorldStrides is the global leader in educational travel and experiential learning. The company was founded over 50 years ago and has grown to provide a wide range of programs for more than 550,000 students annually from more than 5,000 K12 schools and universities to over 100 countries around the world. WorldStrides offers experiential learning programs in educational travel, performing arts, language immersion, career exploration, service-learning, study abroad, and sports. Each of these experiences helps students to see beyond the classroom and to see the world - and themselves - in new ways.

About the Position

As the Web Developer for our higher ed division, you will be part of the Higher Ed Marketing Team supporting UI/UX front end development including building, enhancing, and supporting our customer-facing web sites. In addition to development, you'll provide technical expertise working closely with all the other functional teams such as Marketing, Sales, IT, and Creative Services to develop the best possible front-end web pages while maintaining high standards of quality and performance.

The position requires strong technical, organizational and communications skills, and a passion for user-centered technology. This role will have direct involvement in hands-on front-end web development. Applicants must have strong knowledge of the modern web environment--from the presentation tier (HTML/CSS/JS) through webservers and caching. The successful candidate will have a strong understanding of industry trends and content management systems and SEO best practices, and will improve on-page SEO by optimizing web pages, identifying opportunities for improvement through internal linking, addition of keywords, improved page meta-data, etc.

This position will build on the agile engineering culture, adhering to development standards and processes, and working with other groups to implement web development best practices.

Responsibilities

• Advanced programming and web design skills to create and optimize websites for SEO purposes.
• Work with web designers to improve the layout, navigation, and display of a web site to enhance its search engine ranking.
• Keep abreast of changes with SEO strategies, tactics and search algorithm shifts.
• Identify and repair SEO issues on websites utilizing diagnostic SEO platform (BrightEdge).
• Optimize sites for search engines and recommend best practices for site navigability, information hierarchy and user experience.
• Regularly conduct keyword research to suggest topics for content development.
• Monitor page rankings for our existing keyword groups and produce regular reporting on performance.
• Utilize and adhere to development standards, release processes, and support procedures.
• Performing root cause analysis on product and process deficiencies, and define and implement changes.
• Regular communication with the marketing team and content providers to discuss priorities and workload.

Required Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of web development experience on large-scale web products.
• Knowledge of all parts of the web stack - i.e. HTML/JS/CSS, web servers, caching, with a specific emphasis on web development and presentation layer technologies.
• Experience implementing multiple projects comprising short and long development cycles with minimal supervision.
• Experience developing and launching websites with SEO best practices.
• Knowledge of ranking factors and search engine algorithms.
• Understanding of at least one or more Content Management Systems, specifically WordPress and Sitecore.
• Must be a self-starter who is able to quickly learn, share and apply knowledge in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills ensuring clear implementation in a manner suiting the audience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Automated build/deploy tools, and automated testing.
• High-level understanding of multi-tier web architectures and object-oriented design patterns and concepts.
• Strong workable knowledge of Google Marketing Platform.
• A point of view on end-user functionality with an eye for highly scalable and easy to use interface design.

Contact:

Amber Garrett

Senior Director of Marketing, Higher Ed