Developed over a number of months, the new Education UK website radically updates and improves our on-line presence, featuring significantly improved content, localised for each market, with the focus on ease of use. The purpose has been to create a ‘destination website’ that students will want to visit regularly and will recommend to others.

The new website follows industry best practice in ease of use and is focused wholly on the needs of the visitor. The new, flatter and more efficient site structure will enable visitors to quickly find the information they are looking for. It will attract and retain more visitors, and for longer.

Creating something new
The British Council undertook an extensive strategic development project to improve the core web and print communications channels so that they might provide a much better offer to students and an inspirational, helpful and impartial guide to opportunities and benefits of a UK education. This major project resulted in a number of significant developments, including a new on-line strategy to reposition the Education UK website’s offer and extend engagement into social media channels.

In October 2009, Sapient was appointed to help the British Council develop its on-line strategy and create a new Education UK website. Sapient is a global agency that provides brand and marketing strategy, award-winning creative work, web design and development and emerging media expertise.

Key developments
The new Education UK website serves as an impartial guide and trusted companion – open, accessible, engaging and makes finding the right course and information easy.

Where once the emphasis of the website was focused on the ‘choosing’ and ‘applying’ stages of the student journey, the emphasis of the new website has broadened out to engage users throughout the entirety of the ‘study abroad’ journey, from ‘choosing’ and ‘applying’ right through to the ‘studying’ and ‘working’ stages, evolving and adapting to cater for their changing needs at each unique stage.

Some of the key developments include:

Content

			Exploration encouraged through scrolling, using long pages of content – users are more likely to stay on the site for longer.
			Use of modular content to enable ‘snacking’, a behaviour known to be common among a younger online audience.

Functionality

			Personalised areas and opportunities to interact with the site’s content to reinforce the sense that users ‘own’ the site.
			Ability to save links, checklists, event details, courses and institutions.
			Users can enrol or register interest for exhibitions / events.
			Content can be published to social networks.
			Users can rate, download and upload content.

Search

			‘Course search’ replaced by ‘finders’ – a user-friendly approach to finding the right information, segmented by type.
			Comparator function allows users to select course, scholarship, institution and agent details for comparison on one page.

These screenshots (337KB) highlight some of the key features of the new website.

The new Education UK website also offers dynamic ‘back office’ spaces for institutions and education agents, enabling both to easily manage the profile content that they have featured on the site.