Creating a family of websites

The AAS had many digital assets, owned by separate units, often working in silos. This led to  disparate branding across the many digital assets, lack of unity in technical platform and functions and a disjointed user experience. 

There was a lack of clarity of purpose for the academy, which translated to its digital assets and communications. There was also concern around how to consult such a large group of internal teams.

Webplace worked closely with the academy to advise on seeking further assistance from partner vendors with facilitating engagements internally to interrogate the academy on its organisational purpose and its users and to seek alignment on a direction.

Webplace also provided an approach that would seek to consolidate the digital assets in design and function that were in consideration. The sites would all use design attributes that provided consistent User Experience and Design language, as well as a single underlying platform (Drupal) for continuity.

Following on from the artefacts that were produced from the discovery piece, the following phases took place.

Discovery

Working closely with the academy, webplace facilitated a series of interaction design workshops to review wireframes and interaction design produced by webplace and all other artefacts produced from the discovery phase. Through a series of iterations, a final set of well-informed wireframes was developed to address key priorities for contextual display of content and priority call-to-actions. The final interaction design then informed the design and build of the website.

Through visualisation of the discovery findings, we were able to align and unite on a message and approach that resonated with the entire organisation and represented what the academy stood for and does.

Technical

Through a number of technical workshops and iterations, a detailed solution design was prepared to outline all functional requirements and technical specifications, which was informed by the discovery phase. This is an important step in identifying the functions to be considered and how those functions would technically be met. Having a clear understanding on paper, allows the project to move to the build phase.

Design

The interface design needed to be considerate of the different purposes, but retaining the overall academy digital brand interface design and user experience. There were some challenging complexities to the functions that required a well considered design approach. Through a number of design iterations, all designs were developed together with the academy, resulting in a design that both webplace and the academy is very proud of.

All designs produced for all assets comply to WCAG AA 2.1.

Build

All developments were completed on the Drupal platform and built using the TailwindCSS framework,

The website was built to be responsive across desktop, tablet and mobile and to comply to WCAG AA 2.1 accessibility guidelines.