The University of Wollongong was founded in 1951 and has evolved to become one of the most recognised universities in Australia, rated in the “Top 2% of Universities in the World” by the Times Higher Education – QS World Universities Rankings. The University of Wollongong’s Faculty of Commerce aims to be the best environment in Australia to research, teach and learn Commerce.
The Commerce Faculty has a wide range of stakeholders who access the Commerce Faculty section of the UOW website for a variety of reasons. Without a website strategy and due to the years of content added to the Commerce Faculty website, the navigation and page layouts suffered with the website evolving into a repository of data rather than a website with conversion points. As a result, information within the website became difficult to find, and in some severe cases, the primary and sub navigation was longer than the content. In preparation for a major website creative redesign, the Faculty of Commerce required assistance in getting their navigation and content structured before the redevelopment.
Internetrix eStrategy consulting cycle was appealing to the Faculty of Commerce, as it contained a comprehensive planning phase that occurred before the creative development of the website. The Faculty of Commerce website required consulting to remove clutter on the website and more effectively communicate with the website’s stakeholders. The Faculty of Commerce was in the pre-creative redevelopment stage, which was a perfect time to start Internetrix Six Step eStrategy consulting cycle.
Internetrix customised eStrategy process delivered the following benefits to the Faculty of Commerce.
Internetrix used our extensive site mapping experience to determine that the Commerce website was too cluttered for the navigation. Consultants were able to work with the Faculty of Commerce team to audit the pages on the old website which resulted in the development of an eight metre wide sitemap of the existing website. This allowed a comprehensive audit to be undertaken across the four schools within the faculty and the opportunity to prune the unnecessary pages of the website.
Having less clutter resulted in improved navigation for the website. Internetrix consultants were able to use their expertise in information architecture to take pages of the website and associate them into several segments which represented the proposed primary navigation of the new website. This task allowed for improved navigation of the website, as key audiences would be able to easily find the information they required from the primary navigation alone.
Still dealing with a large website with several segmentations of audiences, Internetrix consultants were able to use Google Analytics to ensure the most used and important pages of the website were given high exposure from the main entry pages of the Commerce website. One method that was provided was the recommendations of having a ‘Quicklinks’ section on the homepage to encourage clickthroughs and increase the usability of the website.