Leeds City College
Our team are well versed in a variety of specialist education sector software packages, such as ProSolution, and can integrate these with your website. Our solutions can seamlessly integrate your website with the rest of your systems, reducing your workload massively.
On behalf of our client, we were asked to redevelop the main website for the end client, Leeds City College. This job was a from-scratch build, which required moving away from the old .NET system. The requirement was to make a modern, easy-to-manage system. It also had to work seamlessly with specialist education software package ProSolution.
A solution needed to be able to pull course information from their ProSolution database and update automatically. Similarly, potential students can apply for places through the website, with application information being put into the ProSolution database.
The WordPress CMS
Our solution uses the WordPress CMS. The reason for this choice is because it is a powerful system capabale of handling the kind of work expected. Additionally, frequent updates make it one of the most secure and efficient systems available. As an open source package, it also puts no additional cost to the end client.
ProSolution Integration
The college stores all its course information on the ProSolution system. Our solution updates every night to make sure the latest offerings are available on the website and that applications are open where necessary. This means that staff can keep their courses up-to-date on the website without ever having to log into the CMS. Also, applications are available for processing by the team without touching the website at all.
Pages for individual courses get created automatically from the data. Campus, school and department information is also created from this data. On top of this, our system offers an easy-to-use page builder which allows for content to be added and built in a logical way. The college use this to add whatever information they want to their site without worrying about how it will look. Also, for some pages, a special template was built so the college can put in content which may not be possible with a standard page builder.
Other Concerns
The end client were also keen for the new website to:
- Meet WCAG accessibility guidelines to level AA. For this, the website must be as easy to use for as wide an audience as possible. This includes users with visual impairments or who are hard of hearing.
- Be mobile-friendly. As with all our websites, the site is as friendly as possible for people using phones or other small devices. This includes some more tricky features such as the application system.
- Respond quickly. With large numbers of visitors, any solution has to be efficient to reduce load times and workload for the server. We were conscious from beginning to end of the site’s scores for Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix.
Our team found this a very rewarding project to work on. As a result of this project, we are able to boast about another fantastic delivery in the education sector. Through our time involved in this, we have gained some great experience and further insights into the world of Further Education.
Home Page
The home page is media-heavy, as with much of the site, to attract a younger audience. The top of the home page features a video to capture imaginations.
Search Page
The search page allows users to filter courses by a number of categories. The diagonally separated boxes are a key part of branding.
Course Page
Each individual course page pulls through information from ProSolution, as well as images related to the course, or the school/department the course is a part of.