Increasing student's engagement online

Context

NoVA is a master of arts program of Aalto university. They needed an upgrade to their website in first place because Aalto university had renewed all their visual identity, and the managers of this master's program felt the need to have their website in a visual language that had familiarity with the new image. The client also wanted to enhance the engagement of the students with the online contents. We later unveiled that it was important to them to cause a better impression of the program in general when visited online.

The client also indicated that they wanted a simple solution because their priority was lowering the costs and having the site online as soon as possible.

Process

In our first meeting we determined what would be the purpose, sections and functionalities of the website. We defined this by listing the reasons why the client needed a new website. In this interview we discovered that not only the students and prospective applicants were important visitors, but also for prospective employers that might be researching a student's background and visitors in general. We also outlined what were the core visual values for these visitors.

We determined that a simple and effective strategy for this would be an implementation of WordPress CMS especially because of the familiarity with the platform that the writers already had. We sought a ready-made theme that was the least complex visually, and we also had a clear list of the visual items that were required to be customizable.

For the student's engagement part we harnessed the user authentication capabilities of WordPress and extended them further with plugins such as conditional linking and user roles control. In this way students can be enabled to create content, but most importantly, the website administrators are able to determine dynamically the limitations of each attribute.

Result

The website can be visited at nova-master.com.

After the completion of this project, the clients were contacted a couple of times to check about the performance of the site. There have been no problems, and to the date this site is used actively.

we discovered that not only the students and prospective applicants were important visitors, but also for prospective employers that might be researching a student's background