Visit Saxion Universities of Applied Sciences

In November Saxion Universities of Applied Sciences launched a redesigned version of their English language website. The following is a Q & A with Michiel Doetjes from the International Office of Marketing and Communications at Saxion with input from Eight Media.

When was the current design of this site launched?

We launched the revamped website on November 9, 2007.

Can you give us a quick overview of the project?

The majority of the student-population of Saxion Universities of Applied Sciences is Dutch (approximately 18,000). International students from practically all over the world make up an other 2,000 of our student-population. While most of our education is being given in Dutch, we have been offering international, English-taught courses for a long time.

Over the last few years, we discovered that more and more students focused on the Internet to collect information about international education and studying abroad. Our website was clearly outdated (see screenshot) and a real disaster in terms of usability and user-centred design. That’s why, late 2006, a new job position was created with a main focus towards redesigning and restructuring the website. So as from January 2007, I joined Saxion’s International Office to set up this project.

What we are aiming for is more traffic to our website and much higher conversions. We believe that the internet will become more and more important and we’re eager to use more of its great new possibilities in terms of interaction with the student.

We started the project by inviting two external agencies and our IT-department to present their way of setting up a project like this. We picked the agency (Eight Media) that didn’t just focus on technical details, but presented a clear vision on usability and marketing. Together with Eight Media, we first worked on the Information Architecture and Interaction Design. It was months later that Eight started on the graphical design.

User tests have been an extremely important part of the project. Eight delivered a prototype of the website, which has been tested by several target-groups, ranging from international students to members of the staff. These tests made it very clear that some of the choices we had been made were very straight-forward for us, but were confusing for the target-audience.

What was the approximate timeframe of the project?

The intial discussions about the project started May 2007, the actual development started around August culminating in the launch beginning of November.

What is the size and make-up of your team?

On Saxion’s end, I (project manager) was the main one involved, leading a group of about 4 people. Eight Media had a team of 4 people working on the project. Eight Media works with a producer who coordinates, supervises and manages the project in creative as well as technical aspects. The producer for the project did the IA/ID and the usability testing, furthermore the team consisted of a graphic designer, a front-end developer and a back-end developer.

Are there aspects of the project you are particularly proud of?

We are very proud of the clear and consistent design. Eight Media managed to get all details right. Besides that, we at Saxion managed to get the Schools to co-operate in writing new content and participate in thinking about the features.

We really started all over again, from scratch. And I think we did a great job… And last, but certainly not least, just a week into the launch of the new website we’ve seen applications increased by 300%!

Were there specific challenges you encountered?

The communications between the different departments within the organisation was a challenge. From consensus about the design to getting all the content required for the new website, the departments have to work together. Compared to our Dutch website, we chose a different approach, resulting in an alternative design. We compete with universities from the USA, United Kingdom and Australia. So in designing the website we chose an approach inspired by university websites from these countries (thank you very much, EduStyle.net!).

What is something you learned from the project?

To be very flexible in the process of accomplishing the project. We were able to make last minute changes (like the tab interface for the program pages).

What platform does the site use (PHP, asp.net, Rails, MySQL, etc.)

The Saxion website was built on the Django platform. Django is a Python web framework that is great for a website like Saxion with muchos content. PostgreSQL was used for the database.

What technologies did you take advantage of (AJAX, APIs, Flash video, etc)?

We used the Javascript framework Prototype for the front-end development and Javascript library scriptaculous and Flash for some interface sexiness. We’ve also used a couple of web 2.0 services like blip.tv for hosting videos, Google maps for some maps and flickr for hosting photos.

Since in our experience search results offered on websites tend to be of poor quality, we powered our search function with a Google Mini. Being able to use Google’s technology extensively for our search results and being able to customize a whole lot is great.

Does the website use a CMS of any kind?

Django comes with an automatic admin interface. Eight Media has enhanced and built out the admin interface to a mature CMS.