Project Overview
Study Bridge Group provides a wide range of high-value marketing campaigns and international student recruitment solutions to colleges and universities across the globe. They approached me to design and develop a series of micro-sites that forms an essential part of their service offering after having previously worked with me on the creation of their student news publishing site.
Objectives
Study Bridge Group required a simple template design that could be easily customized to suit a particular college or university marketing campaign. Potential site users are dispersed across various geographical locations in various continents and use a mixture of devices; most notably smart phones with limited access to WIFI. Therefore the micro-sites would need to be feature a unified responsive design so the sites worked across devices and platforms. Website speed was also an important factor as some users may only have limited internet connectivity so displaying content quickly was very important if users were to stay engaged whilst reading content that may not have been in their primary language.
SEO also featured highly within the project objectives as this had a direct relationship to the quality score in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns which means that cost per click (CPC) rates are lower for well optimised pages.
What I did
I designed and developed a basic responsive template using Twitter Bootstrap, PHP and JQuery which integrates with amazon CloudFront and the clients CRM and analytical software. I approached the project with scalability in mind and created a simple static HTML solution that is quick to load and has a clear call to action on every page. Using Twitter Bootstrap also opens up the opprtunity to use some of its nice interactive features such as accordions and modal windows. I also implement a responsive image gallery with JQuery to provide a highly stylised user experience whilst shying away from anything too loud as the micro-sites are very much content-led and legibility is hugely important for users where English may not be their primary language.
The micro-sites were launched on a managed VPS solution that was quick to render the static HTML pages and various caching techniques were used to make sure that content was delivered quickly to end users.
Results
The micro-sites have proved very successful in generating leads and conversions from various digital channels such as pay-per-click advertising and organic search engine result pages. The sites are responsive and work across mobile, tablet and desktop platforms and feature simple integration with CRM and web analytics services which provides the client with a great overview of the performance of the business and individual marketing campaigns.