Barnfield College

A website revamp to reflect the positive change at a vocational college that needed to regain it’s good reputation with stakeholders throughout the local community.

The knowledge and commitment in the team is indisputable. But don’t take my word for it – the brilliant results achieved so far speak for themselves

REHANNA KHANMarketing Manager, Barnfield College
Barnfield College Website

THE CHALLENGE

Over the past decade, Barnfield College’s brand and reputation had suffered as a result of poor management and Ofsted downgrades. In the last few years, under new leadership, it has been successfully re-building its reputation within local communities and Ofsted alike.

THE BRIEF

Barnfield recognised the importance of their website as part of this programme of improvement. It now needed to shed its old skin and mirror these new higher standards of the college, bringing it inline with branding across other assets, whilst creating an enhanced user experience across all devices.

THE SOLUTION

Immedia Creative brought a new lease of life to the Barnfield website with an engaging look and feel, integration with social activity and improved ability to act as a conversion engine for new applicants.

WORKING HAND IN HAND

To ensure complete understanding of the College’s complex requirements, we started the project with a kick start meeting between key contributors and stakeholders. This day long process allowed us to delve deeper into requirements and initially test ideas for viability.

A USER CENTRIC APPROACH TO DESIGN

The next stage was to move on to wire framing key pages of the site to allow us to test content layout ideas and ensure user journeys were clear and obvious. Only when these layouts were agreed did we move on to applying design.

An updated brand had already been introduced across other marketing assets, which provided a strong steer on look and feel. Bringing this branding to the college website, we created an enhanced digital identity that showcased the college in a more positive light, provided a feel for life on campus, and inspired the many various types of web visitors to get involved. We also made sure that content and navigation was just as easy to find and use on any any device they happened to be using to view the site.

WEB BUILD AND DEVELOPMENT

Once designs had been signed off our attention turned to building the site from scratch on the WordPress platform. WordPress was the best choice because of it’s general ease of use and because some of the Barnfield team already had familiarity with the platform.

A major part of the web build was integration with the college’s own database of courses. The technical team at Barnfield were able to supply us with a daily XML feed of course data, so we wrote bespoke code to sort and display the relevant fields on a number of key pages. In order to make this data portable to new pages when required, our programming also generated shortcodes to allow admin staff to integrate data feeds wherever they wished.

Barnfield College Desktop Screenshots

THE RESULTS

Right from the project kick start meeting, our collaborative approach with the Barnfield marketing and IT team, ensured they could see the new website as it developed and had full input into the project at every stage. By using a range of collaborative development tools and processes, and regular communication and project reviews at every stage of the project, we ensured the project progressed without any misunderstandings and stayed firmly on-track.

Launched on-time and on-budget

Delivery of a website on-time and on-budget in just 12 weeks from commencement to completion.

Work with us

The knowledge and commitment in the team is indisputable. But don’t take my word for it – the brilliant results achieved so far speak for themselves

REHANNA KHANMarketing Manager, Barnfield College