Education Scotland

Website platform migration and refresh

Education Scotland are charged with supporting and improving education for learners of all ages in Scotland: from early learning, child care and schools to community learning and development.

THE SERVICES WE PROVIDED

Application Development

Web Design

User Experience

Digital Strategy

Their website was no longer supporting their needs, so they asked us to build them a new site with improved reliability and responsiveness, that would meet accessibility guidelines, whilst being easy for their content editors to update, including the ability to support bilingual content (English and Gaelic).

Our team looked at their needs and requirements and suggested a complete structural redesign and move to an Umbraco Content Management System (CMS), hosted on Microsoft Azure. They liked our vision, and we were able to create a site that works for both Education Scotland and their thousands of users.

CHALLENGES

improve site reliability
AA compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2, whilst keeping the look and feel of their brand
migrate a large amount of content and media from the existing site on SharePoint to the new site on Umbraco
seamlessly redirect users to the new locations of migrated content and media

TECHNOLOGY

THE SOLUTION

we built Azure architecture that allows load balancing and geo-replication, ensuring high availability of the site
smart use of colour, defined using CSS styling, allowed the site to be AA compliant whilst maintaining their brand look
bespoke scripts to migrate the data from the SharePoint site to the new Umbraco site
HTTP Handlers and content finders to seamlessly redirect users to the new site locations

OUTCOMES AND BENEFITS

reduced costs on hosting and third party firewalls
reliable with no reported downtime
improved editing experience; content editors can improve and expand content as and when required
improved accessibility and responsiveness
improved search experience for users