brief
Aston University offers top-quality higher education courses on a safe and friendly campus in central Birmingham. It boasts a multicultural community of students from more than 120 countries, and teaching and research that delivers both local and global impact.
We partnered with Aston University in 2019 with an initial brief to scope their digital and web requirements in detail. The university wanted a clear route to success, including improving website design and UX, more content flexibility, better visibility and promotion, and attracting more students through clearing – and all within a very tight timeline. Following this scoping, we were sucessful in securing the university’s web development and build project through a tender process.
action
For the initial scoping, we conducted extensive research to establish the university’s needs and priorities. This included workshops, meetings, and analysing the previous web system. We also undertook user testing to find out exactly how people were using the Aston website and establish where they were encountering difficulties and struggling to find information.
At the end of this phase, we produced a detailed report outlining digital build requirements and showing a clear roadmap for success. The university needed to work within extremely tight deadlines to ensure the new site was ready for clearing in August – its busiest time of year. As Aston has a large volume of content that was working well on the existing system, it only planned to migrate the homepage, course pages and news pages to the new system, therefore ensuring effective integration and communication between systems was vital.
We were delighted to be successful in tendering for the web development project. Our new Drupal 8 web design has a sophisticated and modern aesthetic, enabling Aston to showcase its courses more effectively and better compete with other universities. There is also more flexibility in the layout and promotion of content, and everything is mobile-responsive. The site integrates perfectly with the previous system to form a seamless user journey. A comprehensive SEO strategy also ensured all updated URLs were mapped and redirected effectively so the university could maintain its vital search engine rankings.
The university had previously had difficulties during clearing, with the site crashing as a large number of students tried to search and apply for courses. This meant that valuable potential students and university revenue were lost. We therefore undertook load-testing and user testing to ensure the new site would be able to withstand the high volume of site users and meet their needs during the clearing period.
As Aston University has a clear hierarchical structure with numerous stakeholders, the whole project was planned and executed meticulously to ensure board and internal group sign-off at different stages and still meet the final deadline.
impact
With Aston’s busiest time of year during clearing in August, the new website’s impact is being tested right now!
However, initial impact is already positive – showing a 4% increase in session duration, a 9% increase in mobile sessions, and a 7-point improvement in average SEO keyword position.
This data was recorded in July 2020, during the four weeks since the website’s launch, which is typically a quiet time for the university. So, even better results are expected during August and beyond – more stats will be provided as soon as we have them.
We are also continuing to partner with Aston University, providing ongoing Drupal support to maintain and manage their website and optimise digital performance.
