Client profile
The leading IT training company in South Wales, e-academy provides training to people around Cardiff, Newport and Bristol.
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“We have found, over the course of our long relationship with Peter Labrow, that his professionalism is second to none. His expertise and direction has contributed immensely to the growth of e-academy and we wouldn’t hesitate in recommending his services to others.”
Lorna Smith, marketing manager, e-academy
e-academy
A content-managed website promoting training courses and services.
Developing a new brand and a new website: helping South Wales’ leading provider of training for computer professionals and users to promote itself on line and in print.
When the time came for e-academy to update its website, the company chose Labrow Marketing.
e-academy and Labrow Marketing have a relationship which goes back more than half a decade: Labrow Marketing was responsible for the previous version of e-academy’s website and also produces the company’s printed promotional materials.
When developing the new website, e-academy wanted to also refresh its visual branding – so that the new site and future printed materials would sport a new, visually striking and consistent appearance.
Labrow Marketing developed a new style that features a bold range of vibrant single colours, giving the company a more contemporary feel and distinctive identity. This new style has already been introduced onto printed materials, such as the e-academy’s training schedule.
How the new identity works with printed materials – an example of e-academy’s training schedule (download as PDF file).
The website is structured mainly around e-academy’s range of training courses – with a key requirement that people can find the course they need quickly and easily. The brief was to make the site as useful as possible for those looking for training courses in Wales. So, from the home page, people can navigate into key course sections (such as ‘Microsoft training‘ and, ‘ITIL training‘ and ‘PRINCE2 training‘) with a single click. The course catalogue itself is designed to make it as easy as possible to find courses, and a site-wide search facility makes this even faster – since just typing in a course code will take you straight to the course you’re looking for.
The site also includes information on special offers and certification tracks. A core part of the last website had been the company’s training news, which has also been carried over to the new site. This has been providing news on technology and training topics since 2004 and has hundreds of subscribers.
Also, e-academy wanted to make more use of social networking, so the site makes it easy for visitors to find the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages, and also to bookmark pages on popular sharing websites such as Stumble Upon and Delicious.
The whole website is fully content managed, using the Umbraco content management system. The content management development was undertaken by one of Labrow Marketing’s technical partners, Net Marketeers. The content management system allows e-academy to edit the content of the website without needing any knowledge of HTML – it uses a rich text editor to add, edit and remove pages as required. To reduce administrative work, dynamic information such as course dates and prices is pulled directly from e-academy’s internal course management system.
The final result is a website that is deceptively simple to use – logically structured and designed very much around the needs of the user (in terms of finding information), the client (in terms of being able to update anything on the site quickly and easily) and search engines (with a great deal of thought and effort put into how well the website is optimised).