IALC

With several different audience types and a large amount of content, the planning phase of this project was vital in ensuring the new site covered all bases and did not neglect any one user. 

Historically IALC has focused its marketing efforts towards third-party agents, communicating their offering to them, who then in turn promote and sell IALC school courses to students. This was very apparent in the structure and language of the old website, which allowed much more opportunity for the new site to talk directly to students and broaden the sites appeal to a wider audience.

We were able to identify this early on in our discovery and planning meetings and use this to inform our decisions about navigation, look and feel, structure and layout. As well as communicating IALC’s mission, the website also serves as a database of its many member schools. Ease of navigation throughout these pages was vital, as was simplifying the many categories and filters needed to get to a users desired result.

The original website had grown with the organisation over time and the structure made it difficult to navigate. Many filter options made searching for schools a challenge and, once a result was found, the content was minimal.

We started over from the ground up, creating a new site structure that was easy to navigate with clearly divided content by audience type. The school pages received a complete re-think with much additional content being added to allow students and agents to get a comprehensive view of any one schools offering.

IALC made it clear that they were looking to modernise and evolve the look and feel of their website but without completely abandoning their current colour scheme. 

We used style tiles as a way to quickly explore different appropriate avenues that the redesign could take. This approach allows for a focused conversation about look and feel, without it becoming confused with content, layout and messaging.

Once decisions were reached we were able to enter the final design phase of the project with some very clear look and feel preferences, which are then combined with layout, structure and content.

Built with TYPO3, an enterprise level content management system the new site is completely editable by the team at IALC. Custom catalogues allow site administrators to effectively manage content throughout the site with extensive categorisation, further easing the burden to keeping a large site up to date.

As with all of our projects, great performance is a high priority. We use clean, semantic and fast loading code and ensure our sites are optimised for great user experience as well as search engine optimisation.

• 65% Increase in Google Page Speed Insights score
• Website load time reduced from 1.58 seconds to 709 milliseconds
• Page size reduced by 62%