The challenge

The National University of Ireland, Galway's (NUI Galway) website was trying to serve current staff and students, prospective students and researchers all at the same time – leading to a maze of over 60,000 pages and 250 sub-sites. With 200-odd web administrators, all continually adding content without any strict governance controls, much of the content was of varying quality and bloated with internal language. But they had a clear business goal: to increase the number of first preference applications – however, the website was not helping to achieve it.

What we did

Web strategy: Early on it became clear that the NUI Galway's web site needed to put prospective students first. This meant reducing the number of departments who once had a slice of the homepage, and relocating departmental homepages. Our strategy report helped communicate this decision, and clearly explained the research behind it.

Content strategy: We created our designs around the content, setting up a process and structure for related content. NUI Galway's content from print marketing materials wasn’t being leveraged online. So we provided frameworks to restructure content, such as course descriptions from the prospectus for the web, produced over 80 pages of custom content and provided Writing for the Web training for all staff involved in content production.

Information architecture: We encouraged NUI Galway to adopt a hub and spoke architecture, with mini-landing pages for each of the global sections, which helped simplify visual design and brought top content to the forefront. We also designed a fat navigational footer to provide quick access to the major subsections. User testing verified our design – showing that a top navigation isn’t always necessary.

Web Analytics: With the number of pages and sub-sites NUI Galway had, their Google Analytics setup was understandably chaotic. We reviewed their implementation, advised that it should be condensed into one account that encompassed the whole site. Their account now provides reporting at a departmental level, has separate reports for external and internal traffic, and gives NUI Galway better data on how their website functions as a marketing tool as opposed to a service for current students and staff.

Course comparison tool: We built new functionality allowing prospective students to compare key data on any number of courses they were interested in – making their choice easier.

Accessiblility: NUI Galway gets traffic from all over the world, so the design had to be universal and accessible. We ensure all our designs are built to be accessible, but we also had them validated by the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology (CFIT).

Visual Design: Working with NUI Galway’s brand guidelines, we produced a new design that is modern, clean and uncluttered.