The University of Wollongong (UOW) has forged a distinct identity among Australian and International universities with its enviable record of achievements in teaching and research. However, UOW’s previous website didn’t reflect the quality and caliber of the organisation.
As the first port-of-call for many prospective students, UOW’s website was important to UOW’s organizational goal of attracting a higher caliber of Domestic Students and a higher number of International students. UOW approached Internetrix based on the previous work they had done in revamping the Future Students section of the UOW website. The project was so well regarded that the team from the University decided they wanted the creative from the Future Students site to be rolled out site wide.
Because the previous website had developed over a long period of time without any site protocols or rules to follow, an entire restructuring, as well as creative overhaul, was necessary to achieve UOW’s goals of attracting a higher caliber of Domestic Students and a higher number of International Students. The sheer size of the overhaul posed several problems for UOW as their eStrategy had to encompass the following faculties:
Each faculty’s audience had differing informational needs which Internetrix needed to consider when creating the website.
Due to the sheer size of the UOW website redesign, the ‘creative’ process was intensive. Because the creative process is subjective in nature, Internetrix provided UOW with four different concepts for the site based on an extensive briefing process designed to provide creative scope.
This ‘concepts’ phase was then followed by a ‘revisions’ process where a chosen concept was refined using extensive UOW feedback (usually using elements from the other concepts) to form a final creative piece for deployment.
As part of the Information Architecture process, Internetrix had developed many page templates to fulfill the information requirements of each page in line with UOW’s key audiences’ information needs. The UOW website’s chosen creative concept then had to be altered to accommodate each template and then ‘cut’ into HTML for the actual creation of the website.
Because UOW had recently purchased a Content Management System (CMS) for their organisation, deployment of the creative into the CMS was necessary. Although UOW possessed many of the skills to conduct this major task in-house, Internetrix helped oversee this part of the project using their high levels of expertise to ensure the functionality and creative of the site remained intact when the site went live. Due to the sheer size of the UOW website, this process took around three months to complete.
Prospective students (see website below), and other stakeholders, visiting the website now see a representation of the University of Wollongong which mimics their reputation as one of the country’s premier, award winning universities. This has provided the University with a clear marketing message and assisted in eliciting the desired perception of UOW in the mind prospects.
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government, membership based organisations and throughout the private sector,
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