The Brief

• The old IATVIC website design was dated and not mobile responsive. It was difficult to figure out and crashed frequently.
• It was built on a proprietary software developed by a company that was no longer providing technical support.
• On numerous occasions, when the site content had finally been updated by the company, the courses were already over.
• Course bookings had to be made over the phone, or via a PDF based registration forms that had to be printed, scanned and emailed back.
• The information on their courses sometimes changed at the last minute e.g. venue, lecture notes etc and there was no means for IATVIC to update students.
• Adding courses and assessor information had to be done manually, one at a time. There was no bulk import process in place.
• The Impairment Assessor search feature was very buggy, returned irrelevant results and crashed often. This was a source of multiple complaints from their stakeholders.
• The office was being bombarded by numerous emails and calls asking for support and multiple complaints about the website.
• IATVIC was under a lot of pressure from WorkSafe to update their website ASAP and they reached out to Edu360 for help.

Our Approach

• There was no upgrade path available from a proprietary based website. It had to be rebuilt from the ground-up on a modern CMS.
• A modern design that was Google SEO compliant and mobile responsive was required to convey the professionalism that comes with getting certified by IATVIC as an Impairment Assessor.
• It was extremely important that staff could get in and make quick content changes for things like venues, timings, lecture descriptions etc for the courses as this information changed frequently.
• IATVIC received a spreadsheet summary of all their course information (in excess of 100 over courses) from a third party supplier but there was not way to import this information into the website. It had to be done manually one by one and was an extremely complex and time consuming task.
• IATVIC had an in house directory of all the certified Impairment Assessment professionals and needed a way that they could bulk upload or update this at one go.
• The numerous support requests and complaints was a huge burden and it affected the productivity and morale of the staff.
• They needed a website that was more reliable and didn’t crash during heavy traffic.

Our Solution

• We built the site on the latest version of WordPress, with a customised backend specific to IATVIC workflows. This allowed staff to quickly edit content in the site using a visual based point and click editor.
• We built an automatic updating homepage which displayed upcoming classes and dropped them off once they had passed. Staff did not need to update the homepage separately after updating seminars or the training calendar information.
• We built a custom module that allowed IATVIC to import ALL their upcoming courses for the semester in one go via a simple CSV file. The module also contained error checking and validation features to minimise errors during the import process.
• We built a custom module that allowed IATVIC to import and/or update Impairment Assessor Information at one go via a CSV. Likewise, the module also contained error checking and validation features to minimise errors during the import process.
• We built a custom Impairment Assessor Search with text and filtering search options.
• Finally we adopted a modern design and ensured that the site was mobile responsive and matched Google SEO requirements.
• We hosted the website on our high performance WordPress optimised server which has been generating an uptime of 99.99%.

The Results

• The staff at IATVIC were delighted that they could finally make changes themselves without having to go through their web development company.
• IATVIC could now import over 500 Impairment Assessors into the website without having to manually create or update records meant that a huge administrative process was now removed.
• IATVIC could also now bulk update seminar information like time, venue, price, purchase links, descriptions at one go with a CSV file. This was very useful an became something they did for one hour a month instead of multiple times a week.
• Their stakeholders remarked on how easy the new Impairment Assessor search was, a huge improvement from the previous search.
• The site was finally mobile responsive and compatible on the phones of the bulk of their traffic from mobile users.
• Support emails and phone calls dropped off to the rare occasion instead of daily.
• Overall team productivity in the office improved as staff members could focus on other tasks instead of worrying about their website.