The Bristol Senior Center has long had its own website, but it had some real limitations and didn’t function well for the seniors. Last year, Maria Ursini and Donna Wilson, the director and assistant director, applied to Roger Williams University’s Community Partnership Center to request a project to rebuild their entire site.

They were teamed up with students in the university’s Web Development Center course, a class that provides students with real-world experience in working on websites for real clients.

This spring semester, five teams of students met with Ms. Ursini and Ms. Wilson weekly to learn what the senior center needed and to present their work and get feedback as it developed. It’s truly an agency experience for the students in pitching their ideas and collaborating with the client.

Professor Al Cutting teaches the class. “It’s not always the technology that wins,” he said. “It’s the group that works well together and shows that they care. Though in this case the winning team had both attributes.”

The students with the winning web design were Sabrina Starace and Nick Stanglewicz. “It was a marvelous collaboration,” said Professor Cutting. “Sabrina was the chief architect and Nick stepped in, and also gave her space.”

The senior center ended up getting a very senior-friendly site that provides easier navigation, translation into Portuguese and Spanish, and a color scheme that is visible to seniors’ eyes (the previous color scheme provided visibility challenges). Testimonials by senior center clients are another highlight of the site.

“One of the things I really like about this project is it forces students to get out of their own heads," said Professor Cutting. “It forces them to think like someone in a different target market.”

“We were really lucky — we had been doing the site on our own,” said Ms. Ursini. “Al Cutting was awesome, and there was a lot of back and forth between Donna and the students.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Ms. Wilson. “There are so many features, and it’s easy to navigate.”

Ms. Starace kept working with the senior center into the summer to finalize and launch the site, even though she has graduated and secured a graphic design job in her home state of New Hampshire. Visit bristolsrctr.com to check out the new site.