Learning something new each day is as simple as eating an apple a day

Always wanting to lead by example, Newham College needed a fresh new website that would inspire people of all ages and demographics to choose the college.

Having fought off stiff competition during the tendering process, we were selected to produce what turned out to be an outstanding website using some of the latest techniques and platforms.

View The Site

 

Appealing to such a wide and varied audience was a challenge The Site Doctor just couldn't turn down!

Having done a lot of research into the various college websites that are out there, we quickly realised they were all very similar.

The new Newham College website however needed to be different and exciting as it is the first opportunity to really sell themselves to the applicant so we put our thinking caps on and got to work.

As the number of people using mobile phones or tablets to view websites has been growing dramatically over the past few years, we knew it was imperative that the new Newham College website displayed well on all devices to avoid missing out on potential students. With this in mind, we built the entire website so it was responsive (adjusts the content to best fit the user's screen).

Not having undertaken a college website before, we were able to take a completely fresh look into ways of improving the user's journey for example the course search uses the same filtered search functionality that we use on our e-commerce websites (called faceted search).

The career finder was one one of our favourite additions to the website. It makes finding a career that little bit more fun and even features a hidden easter-egg or two. To give Newham College control over the results, they are able to "tag" the courses with relevant search terms through the administration area. 

Building the website on the powerful CMS - Umbraco, enabled us to provide Newham College with the ability to control their content easily with the minimum of fuss. Tying in bespoke functionality allowed us to create much more content that proves useful to all visitors.

As with e-commerce, the user story and flow is of paramount importance and the Newham College website offered us the challenge of fulfilling an e-commerce experience without the commerce.

Innovation is an important part of any creative design and experience. With this in mind, wherever possible we created tools to assist the visitor, such as the on-the-fly application form generator which creates a completed PDF version of the application form for the visitor to save and print off.

Working closely with Newham College and their carefully selected team we were able to design and build a college website that we are very proud to have been a part of. What's better is the journey doesn't end here as we are already discussing how we can further enrich the user's experience.