About the Project
Founded in 1987 by Michael Young and based in Barnsley, OCA is the distance learning partner of the Open University, delivering a wide range of online higher education arts courses to students around the world. With an open access policy, the college accepts enrolments every day of the year.
The Brief
The OCA website had been in use for about three years, and the team felt it was time for an update. Key requirements were for a more coherent design language, a more straightforward and logical user journey, and a change of approach in how enrolments were made. Rather than students signing up to individual units one by one, the new website needed to provide an easier route for someone to enrol in an entire degree if they wished.
AA accessible web design
One of our key goals was to standardise design elements across the board – still providing a wide range of flexibility through more than a dozen bespoke modules for our CMS page-builder, but bringing a consistency to layouts, menu structures and visual styles that makes the site easier to understand and navigate.
The main focus of the design and build was ease of use – providing clear user journeys for new users and returning students alike. AA accessibility was an absolute priority, but AA accessibility is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to Splitpixel’s approach to web design.
Read more about our accessible web design projects for the education sector.
Increase in visitors
More enrolments than the same period the year before.
Within six months of launching their new website.
Brand Expansion
We don’t tend to think of enrolling on a university or college course as a commercial transaction, but that’s what it is at its core – the OCA website needs to accept payments in exchange for its services.
The original build used WooCommerce, a powerful ecommerce shop plugin for WordPress. As a WordPress agency, we were keen to retain this functionality to provide continuity for the OCA team in managing the site.
However, the change to focus on full degrees rather than individual units required a much more involved purchasing process. We made use of extensive conditional forms to allow users to select multiple course units, apply premiums based on their locations, and choose from a variety of payment options, such as deposits, instalments and student finance.
Ultimately, this is WooCommerce pushed to its absolute limit for a highly unique and bespoke system.
Driven by ecommerce
We don’t tend to think of enrolling on a university or college course as a commercial transaction, but that’s what it is at its core – the OCA website needs to accept payments in exchange for its services.
The original build used WooCommerce, a powerful ecommerce shop plugin for WordPress. As a WordPress agency, we were keen to retain this functionality to provide continuity for the OCA team in managing the site.
However, the change to focus on full degrees rather than individual units required a much more involved purchasing process. We made use of extensive conditional forms to allow users to select multiple course units, apply premiums based on their locations, and choose from a variety of payment options, such as deposits, instalments and student finance.
Ultimately, this is WooCommerce pushed to its absolute limit for a highly unique and bespoke system.
Digital marketing strategy
In the six months after launching the website, we measured 20.1% more new visitors and 36.4% more enrolments than the same period the year before.
We’re continuing to offer our support for OCA – one of our longest digital marketing partnerships. While updating content is easy, we’re on hand for more in-depth amends and technical fixes as the site continues to grow and change.
Every year we create a bespoke content marketing strategy, structured in collaboration with paid ads for optimum results. Senior Marketer Ash B manages their paid ads strategy, including their Google Ad Grants account (for registered charities). Senior Content Writer Ell manages their organic SEO content strategy – optimising pages, restructuring menus to improve user journey, and tailoring bespoke SEO copy for OCA’s audience.
We’ve also supported OCA with tailored social media campaigns, helping schedule posts, design branded assets, write copy, and measure results.
“I have worked with a number of agencies and wanted to highlight the absolute pleasure of working with Splitpixel. They have dealt with a few staff at the OCA and every time they provide an outstanding level of customer service. Not only are they efficient, but they’re also able to multi-task, providing effective high-quality solutions to our problems and challenges.
They are truly making the website improvement experience as fruitful as possible. Their team has provided great communication throughout, using their resources to get the job done properly. We are delighted to continue working with them.”
Heather Lloyd Payne, Lead Marketing & Communications
Open College of the Arts
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