Website design | Website build | Content
Website design | Website build | Content
Shipley College, based in the beautiful UNESCO world heritage site of Saltaire, had a significantly less beautiful website.
The website as it was had been built over a decade earlier, was cumbersome to manage, complicated in navigation and did not do a good job in bringing the 'great people, great place' brand identity of the college to life.
No video stories, underwhelming imagery, little celebration of the amazing Italianate village in which the college exists, and a lack of SEO-friendly copy.
It was time to be Cubbyfied.
The Project
After being successful in the tender process, work got underway to understand the college's customer segments and their journeys. We worked on a wireframe for a much slicker navigation, taking the various customer groups to better information, more attractively presented, in much fewer clicks.
The design took in the new brand direction of the college, funkier, fresher and more colourful, and with much greater scope for the use of striking imagery and all-important video content.
We ran user testing with all persons of significance at the college, to understand what was important to them and their teams, tested again as we built, and created feedback forums so we could keep abreast of anything that wasn't working as it needed to.
Regular check-ins with the marketing team at the college, as well as various other stakeholders, kept the project on time and on budget.
The new Shipley College website launched to an excellent reception, web traffic and time on page data instantly increased, and this quickly contributed to best-ever recruitment figures for school leavers.
Check out how we approached the project,
and a quick home page tour, below:
Our Process - Problem Solving
First step - undertake a process to discover any issues and problems the organisation or their web users had with the previous website - navigation, difficulty in finding information, lack of engaging content, difficulty in managing media, issues converting to sale, etc - and create a suitable solution
Our Process - Customer Journeys
To inform future decisions, we needed to understand the customer groups and their journeys, so we worked with the college to define demographics, segment audience personas, and assign questions to each persona - questions that the new website should answer
Our Process - Creative Concepts
In terms of creative input, we provided extensive designs of what the home page could look like, with use of all the various pods we were also designing. Efforts were first focused on the home page and Contact Us page, as the majority of visitors would begin their journey by landing on the home page, and the goal was to inspire them to go on a user journey to the point of contacting the college.
Our Process - Pods and pages
Once the creative concepts as a whole were approved, design could begin on all the other individual pods and full webpages, utilising the streamlined navigation and much-improved site map generated
Our Process - Build & Support
...and once the pods and pages were all available, the website was built, with support giving to the in-house team in terms of preparing and uploading rich content and media
Our Process - Test, launch and maintain
Test, test, TEST! And then bug fixes. And then forums for a wide range of teams and stakeholders to feed back both pre-launch and within the first weeks of deployment. On a complex project, operating in an ever-changing sector, with a wide range of vested interests at play, it is possible that needs may change or requirements come to light - and that's fine. Then, of course, remain in place to support, update, secure and maintain as required.
