How do you build a new website for one brand within an existing website of another? That was the challenge from The University of Bath's School of Management.
The School of Management needed a new site as part of their “Think Ambitious” rebrand, but it had to be built upon the wider university’s existing, custom CMS. Alongside the design and development challenges we also had to uncover the user needs of a large and varied audience.
For the user research, we conducted a mixture of online and in-person surveys and one-on-one interviews. These revealed significant differences in what the groups wanted to find on the website. For instance, overseas students were highly concerned with the safety of the city while MBA students prioritised connections with business and work placements. Crucially, the data helped us identify the user journeys, key functions and content requirements for each group.
Armed with this knowledge we planned the sitemap, content and user journeys, and designed a series of customisable modules and page templates to deliver these. We then worked with the university’s digital team to integrate the components with the existing CMS. To deliver the greatest flexibility and longevity of use, we created inbuilt styling options for each one, including background colours, fonts, and text and image alignment. This enables the customisation of each component, to match the branding of the School of Management in the first instance and any other school within the university that wants to use them in the future.
