The Brief

The ARC Centre of Excellence in Convergent Bio-Nano Science & Technology (CBNS) had a older functioning website based on Drupal 7. However, the website was no longer achieving their online communication targets.

The website did not reflect the bustling hive of activity happening within the Centre. It did not showcase their prolific researchers, the Centre’s exciting projects and wealth of publications.

CBNS saw the urgent need to revamp the Centre’s online communications to raise the Centre’s profile. By doing so, they would develop more collaborations between the Centres researchers, other Universities and research institutes locally and internationally.

CBNS reached out to Edu360 to redevelop their website in-line with a new online communications strategy and re-affirm their status as a thought leader in a highly competitive industry.

Our Approach

• Site content could only be managed by a staff member proficient in HTML and CSS and Drupal. So when he was away on leave they would be stuck.
• According to their analytics, entry on the website was happening through staff profile pages more so than the homepage. But these pages had very little information other than a short bio and some contact details and the traffic dropped off quickly.
• There was no way to bulk upload or update their publications and this became an extremely time consuming task.
• The website did not showcase the research projects being run at Centre.
• The site made extensive use of HTML tables to display content and threw out the site layout on a phone or tablet.
• CBNS was not leveraging social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn which were becoming popular among researchers.

Our Solution

• We brainstormed the specifications of the new CBNS site together with the director and website administrator.
• We revamped the staff profiles to be more comprehensive and function like a landing page.
• To simplify website maintenance, we developed a centralised database of publications, projects, staff profiles and collaborations that had inter-linked content.
• We built a custom plugin that allowed CBNS staff to do bulk imports and updating of publications and staff profiles data via an Excel spreadsheet.
• We developed a very efficient custom search for the database with a powerful keyword search combined with filters that located publications and staff profiles almost instantaneously.
• A nifty counter on the homepage automatically displays the number of staff members, publications, projects and collaborations happening at the Centre as content is added.
• We integrated the Centres’ Twitter feed seamlessly into the homepage design.
• We developed a visually appealing design using the eye catching photography on a modern and fluid mobile responsive layout.

The Results

Within 6 months of the launch, CBNS website page views had grown by over 500%.

There was a huge increase in Twitter followers and they were noticing much more engagement. They were recording more downloads of the seminar PDFs. Resources were being accessed more frequently and many visitors were returning to browse through their courses database.

The CBNS staff expressed their joy at the ease of use and the ability to manage the website in-house without the need of an external developer. The CBNS members were delighted with the new design and how easy it was to navigate and get the content they wanted. They especially loved how new resources were automatically published on the homepage giving them incentives to keep returning to the site.

Without any additional marketing, searches for prominent CBNS researchers now returned page 1 results on Google behind their main University profile pages.