Collège Boréal – Website
Created at Kaboom communication design in 2016 with WordPress
Collège Boréal is a French-language college offering multiple educational programs through six campuses and dozens of service centres across Ontario.
Its main site had remained the same for several years when the Collège decided it was time to completely renew it some time in 2015. This led to the launch of a more accessible and enrolment-oriented website during the summer of 2016.
My Role for this Project
- Writing of proposal
- UX design
- Development planning and management
- Web development
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
The Results
- A greater amount of new visitors
- More visits on program pages
- Faster-loading pages
Writing of Proposal
- Complete analysis of request for proposals
- Evaluation of project feasability, in-house qualifications and required external resources
- Evaluation of tasks, nature and amount of work required
- Global financial evaluation of the project, on a per-resource and per-task basis
- Writing of understanding of mandate and proposed approach
- Elaboration of deadlines
UX Design
The main objective of the Collège in revamping their website being to improve student enrolment, priority had to be given to programs and campuses, while creating navigation patterns that would encourage decision-making. Having an always visible call-to-action button (Apply Now!) directly above the main menu, which in turn starts with Programs and Locations, was meant to make it easy for young visitors to make a decision about whether they wished to attend Collège Boréal after completing high school.
The target audience (mostly high school students) being young, open-minded, curious and technologically savvy, it was possible to move away from a more traditional user interface, instead going with a left-hand, full-height vertical menu, with panes opening to its right. This menu would remain very similar across all devices, allowing for a more uniform user experience regardless of context.
Sub-menus would also benefit from a theme-based visual organization of the information, making searching through them easier, especially for sections of the website containing a large number of second-level pages, such as Student Services, College Life, Future Students and About Boréal.
Although not as numerous, the Collège’s other audiences (adult or international applicants, parents or guardians) would also benefit from this renewed website, as custom landing pages would be made for them, available from the home page and the Future Students section.
Development Planning and Management
- Development of the structure of content types
- Planning of interactions (user-interface and content-type-to-content-type relations)
- Planning of functionalities
- Supervision of development (identification of tasks, identification of milestones and quality control)
- Planning and coordination with the Collège’s IT team of an automated, daily import of programs, courses and calendar events from internal databases
Web Development
- Fine tuning of the import process with the WP All Import plugin
- Development of a section displaying pathways between programs available at Collège Boréal and other institutions, using the Advanced Custom Fields Pro plugin
- Creation of the calendar events’ import process and programming of PHP functions to adequately display event dates and times (manipulation of date and time formats) with the WP All Import plugin
- Development of custom variables for using with the Yoast SEO plugin (see below) by manipulating data via PHP functions
- Full development of the Ateliers Boréal (“Boréal Workshops”) microsite (ateliers.collegeboreal.ca) using WordPress
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Writing of title and meta description templates for program pages