Longley Park’s super swish new site
The brief
Longley Park Sixth Form College wanted us to design a brand-new, high-spec website that would totally revolutionise their out-dated application process and essentially provide them with an online presence that matched their world-class post-16 learning environment on the outskirts of Sheffield.
The Longley Park team were keen on the project delivering on the following goals:
- A website that integrated directly with their local online area prospectus, so they could manage all their courses and applications in one place.
- Facilities to showcase all their further education courses, important news and dates and information about the college’s culture itself in a way that looks good but was still easy for people to use.
- They wanted the website to reflect the college’s own unique identity.
Our team worked closely with the guys at Longley Park to produce something that, we firmly believe, delivered on each of the original goals and then some!
Integrated clever software that revolutionised the application process
Due to Sheffield City Council using our eProspectus as their local area prospectus, we were able to effortlessly connect it to the new website.
This meant that the Longley Park team would benefit from being able to add, edit and delete course details in one place, instead of having to duplicate the work, as they had done up until this point.
Also, as part of the integration, potential students could start applying for their courses themselves through the website because of the Common Application Process (CAP).
Before, potential students still had to download a PDF application form, complete it and email it to their HR team. This change will not only save Longley Park time, it will also reduce the amount of errors within any application.
Built a great looking website that’s fast and super-easy to use
Our experienced web developers created over 50 bespoke pages for the website, as well as one for each of the 11 A-levels they offer.
They also chose Umbraco as the CMS because its easy-to-understand backend interface allows the Longley Park team maximum control of the content on the pages.
With most web users now coming from mobile devices, we designed the entire site to be accessible from any mobile device and made sure our landing pages were super light-weight so they could upload quickly.
Often, people who are conducting research are doing it on the go, not at home in front of a PC. So, we built light pages so people can access them from just about anywhere.
Created a little piece of the internet, just for Longley Park
To give the site its distinctive identity (that never fails in its ability to draw you in) we combined elements from their existing brand guidelines with ability to create engaging and interactive web pages.
We used strong visuals on each of the pages to help tell the college’s story, edgy geometric patterns to give each page a genuine uniqueness and a colour scheme of blue, yellow and white to keep Longley Park’s new website on brand.
We think that all these elements resulted in a truly handsome looking website that’s perfect for a post-16 educational audience.
“It was great to work with Longley Park on this project. We were able to tap into our experience working with other further education colleges to improve the user journey on website, create something that engages with their target audience and streamlines the application process.” Shane Traill (Director, First Media)
