Your digital thought partners. CASE STUDY GradAustralia GradAustralia GradSingapore GradMalaysia PostgradAustralia Multisite solution Launch Website
Overview 01. 02. 03. 04. Connecting graduates to opportunities Bringing success online Multi-site solution for expansion into Asia Sprint-based feature building
01. Connecting graduates to opportunities A skyrocketing business offline necessitated a strategic approach to growing online and challenging competitors in the space. GradAustralia is a specialist provider of internship and graduate job listings, tools and resources. It provides unrivalled advice to those completing their university degrees and looking for a big, first employment opportunity. The organisation started in 2015, publishing their first print edition of Australia s Top 100 Graduate Employers. The guide was such a success - with an overwhelming positive response from graduates, educators and employers - that the business rapidly expanded, with a key necessity being to significantly boost its digital presence. Digital Garden were approached to lead the digital strategy for the business, bringing a redesign and development of new features to a platform that needed to keep pace with the popularity of the published edition. Page 03
02. Bringing success online Translating the print success to digital meant investing the time to understand users and their goals on-site. The mission was to go back to the blackboard on the user experience (UX) of the GradAustralia website, gaining a strong understanding of who their users were and making for a carefully-crafted new experience. Digital Garden prototyped new features such as search functionalities, user dashboards, a blog and employer landing pages. We brought an enriched journey of interrelated content, showcasing related content, giving users the ability to save job listings and employers, as well as a star rating and review system for employers. A key component to the success of GradAustralia s new digital presence was an smart and aggressive search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign. Digital Garden conducting an extensive audit on keywords and an in-depth competitor analysis, which also helped inform our approach to the information architecture and development best-practice. All pages of the site have been built with strong SEO principles in mind, which assist in very targeted campaigns run on-site. Page 04
03. Multi-site solution for expansion into Asia With GradAustralia exploding across the Australian education and employment sectors, the next logical step was expansion: first stop Singapore, then Malaysia. GradAustralia is built on Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS) framework Digital Garden advocates. The beauty of Drupal is that you can utilise the multi-site feature, meaning multiple sites can share in the single installation of Drupal. The shared components include the core codebase and frontend design themes. The effort and cost benefit of this is in managing the code, where any upgrades and patches need to only be completed the one time and deployed across the multi-sites you have setup. Each site, however, has its own settings and content that is unique to that site, it simply capitalises on a common codebase and structure. This approach was the perfect solution for GradAustralia when they wanted to expand across Asia, starting spin-off sites in both Singapore and Malaysia. The teams in those countries had their own frontend themes and content creators, however the backend development was centrally managed and executed by the development team at Digital Garden. Page 05
04. Sprint-based feature building A sprint-based development of new features each month across the multi-site architecture meant a constantly evolving and growing digital presence for the Grad businesses. With the benefit of a shared codebase, each of the Asian sites benefited from the development of new features on the GradAustralia site that could be rolled out across the multi-site architecture. Following the initial website development of GradAustralia, Digital Garden were engaged to work on a retainer model with GradAustralia. It worked so that, each month, we would hold a strategic meeting to discuss new features and improvements, and then schedule these improvements across two development sprint-planning sessions that month. The completion of new features were deployed, reviewed and pushed live at the end of each sprint. These included: Integration with social marketing tool: We sync Drupal users with contacts on the Active Campaign platform. Google Structured Data: Added dynamic JSON-LD objects for: jobs, courses, organisations, social, and articles, so that Google Search could understand better the content of each page. Content importers: To import mainly courses and users using csv files. Custom user registration/login flow: Implementation of a pop-up based system, including errors and configurable welcome messages. Top 100 ranking: Configurable ranking system with support to ranking per category options. Application to jobs/courses: We developed flexible solution to choose between email or online applications and configurable application forms. Also, a mechanism to define jobs/courses expiration rules. User Dashboard: Users are able to save different type of content like jobs, courses, articles and institutions in their own dashboards. Page 06
Your digital thought partners. Get in touch.