Founded in 1858, St Vincent’s college is an independent Catholic Day and Boarding School for girls. St Vincent’s is one of the oldest Catholic day and boarding schools for girls in Australia. Located in Potts Point, an inner-city suburb of Sydney, the school hosts approximately 680 girls in Years 7 to 12, including 140 boarders.
St Vincent’s College, being a private school, relies heavily on its website to generate interest in the school and prospective students. Struggling with a website that, according to St Vincent’s Staff, was “difficult to navigate and cumbersome to use when attempting to find information”, St Vincent’s required a strategy for the website to improve usability and information structure for the key audiences: Staff, Current Students, Current Parents, Prospective Students and Prospective Parents.
St Vincent’s College required an Internet Consultant for providing services to assist in planning a strategy that would deliver an outstanding new website. Internetrix Six Step eStrategy consulting process was a perfect fit for St Vincent’s requirements of organising information in the most appropriate method and designing an effective navigation to improve usability of the website for key audiences. The eStrategy process involved identifying the key pages of the website for each audience and ensuring there was a clear clickpath to these pages from main landing pages, determined by Google Analytics reports. As well as this, wireframes and sitemaps developed as part of the consulting process enable information to be effectively presented and option for quick conversions were available from across the website.
Internetrix eStrategy consulting provides a variety of benefits to different organisations. The following results were experienced by St Vincent’s College as a result of eStrategy consulting services.
Sitemaps developed by Internetrix were used to portray the most effective navigation for the new St Vincent’s College website. This navigation was aimed at allowing information to be easily found on the website by various key audiences. By using Google Analytics, main landing pages were determined and efficient clickpaths to important pages from these landing pages were identified.
A requirement expressed by St Vincent’s College was for the new website to be engaging enough to provide an increase in returning visitors. Internetrix deployed several visitor retention features on the wireframes of the new St Vincent’s College website that were aimed at increasing the likeliness of a return visit. An example of such a feature was a News section that was placed in a prominent area on the homepage, as well as having a news listing page. Vanity/Smart URLs, such as /sport and /fees, were also planned for to allow existing parents and power users to get straight to the page they required.
As part of the eStrategy consulting process, Internetrix provided wireframes for the St Vincent’s College homepage. The new homepage wireframes were targeted at organising information in the most effective way to encourage clicks to conversion pages. Several layouts were presented for St Vincent’s College to allow for options when choosing homepage layout.
Sixteen page types of the St Vincent’s College website were created by Internetrix and wireframes were provided. Each of these layouts were designed by Internetrix creative designers with business objectives, Google Analytics data and navigation in mind.
The eStrategy process resulted in a Wireframe Document that contained effective page layouts. This document was created with the intent that it would be passed on to St Vincent’s College’s preferred creative provider, who would be able to redesign the website at a reduced cost due as the information architecture already being established by the eStrategy consulting performed by Internetrix.