Summer Schools & Summer Courses Directory

This directory website helps people find summer courses, e.g. a week of English and sports for children or a climbing course for adults.

The brief

We were asked to rewrite the website without losing its great position in the rankings. The problems with the old site were:

• People could not find what they were looking for (evidence of this was in the enquiries people sent in).
• It had an out-dated design that did not look good on modern high-resolution screens.
• It was not easy to maintain.

What we did

We created a totally new design, and re-built the site using a package called IndexU. This allows you to manage users and listings. It also collects statistics on the most popular categories and listings.

The new site went live in January 2009 to coincide with the start of schools’ marketing season. The new site is working extremely well from the search engine optimisation point of view and visitor numbers are up on the corresponding period last year.

Features

The benefits of the new system are:

• People can easily find what they are looking for by browsing the categories or key word search, e.g. “Bronze casting”.
• The advanced search allows you to filter by region and age group as well.
• The new design look fresh and clean.
• It is extremely easy to maintain, e.g. adding new categories.

Technical notes

A number of modifications were made to IndexU to add the necessary features. These include:

• Images uploaded are automatically resized if they are too large.
• Emails sent through the site have a message added, explaining where the email was sent from, and copies are sent to the administrator to check for abuse.
• 100% discount coupons can now be issued, to allow clients who have pre-paid to create their Silver/Gold listing.

Are you looking for something like this? Why not get in touch with us?