© 2015 Simeon Rowsell. All rights reserved.
Bath College
Bath College recently merged with another College, changing their name and rebranding in the process, and as such needed a new site to reflect this change of structure and bring their important online presense into 2015. Working at Bath College at the time, I took on the responsibility and, with digital agency FX, designed, built and project managed the huge 2000+ page site.
www.bathcollege.ac.uk
PLANNING
Such a large site, with so many uses and important features, needed meticulous planning. We initiated a much needed re-structuring of the content and planned the new site map with decisions driven by analytics and user feedback.
Filter System
We realised that prospective students are effectively ‘shopping’ for their desired course and so built the course structure with that in mind. This allowed us to build an intuitive search and filter system as well as utilise multiple subject categories so that courses can be listed under as many relevant subjects as deemed appropriate, and so, are easier to find.
Flexibility
The college offers a wide range of courses to a wide range of people and so one of the greatest challenges was to ensure the site was flexible enough to cater for each different course type and the various details and application processes they require. This was something that they struggled with on their old site and so was a big improvement to the administration process for the staff.
E-commerce
The College sells a range of ‘Love2learn’ leisure courses so we included an e-commerce platform that allows users to purchase and sign up for courses online with ease and, importantly, also allows the College staff to administer the enrolments internally.
Having added so many features, taken so many decisions and had discussions with so many people throughout this project, I could talk about it forever (feel free to get in touch if that sounds appealing!). It was great to work with the guys at FX. This was a huge project to undertake, with many challenges to overcome, but its success has left me full of experience in handling such a comprehensive and contemporary site.
