Hopwood Hall College

Case Study

Hopwood Hall is a vocational further education college located in Middleton & Rochdale. They came to I-COM looking to rebuild their website.

13% increase in users

The Brief

Hopwood Hall College

Hopwood Hall wanted a fresh new design that would set them apart from other further education providers in Greater Manchester.

At the same time, they needed a site that they could update easily via the CMS. The site needed to integrate into EBS Course Information Portal and also to showcase their public-facing services.

They asked for a site with strong visuals that was not text-heavy that would be easy to navigate and could prominently integrate their social media content as this is the primary way they reach their target student base.

The Approach

Hopwood Hall college

One of the key factors in the build was the need to integrate with EBS. EBS is a typical management system that doesn't lend itself towards displaying rich content on the web, so we set up an automated process to check EBS once a day for updates. When the system finds a new course, it pulls in the base information and notifies the web admin. Using the CMS, the admin can then easily enrich the content to provide a greater user experience.

EBS Integration

Microsite

Social Board

Concrete5 CMS

The Results

Hopwood Hall College

Visitors are finding the site far more engaging - it has an impressive bounce rate of just 35%. User sessions have increased 18% and visitors look at an average of 3.4 pages per visit and spend 3 min 02 sec per session.

Mobile is now far and away the biggest percentage of people accessing the site, and in Google’s new mobile-first index, the site has great coverage, with over 6,100 different non-brand terms sending traffic each month.

18%
Increase in Sessions
14%
Improvement in Bounce Rate
13.5%
Increase in Users

From the first meeting, through the tender process, design and build, I have absolutely no complaints and can only compliment and thank the I-COM team for all their hard work over recent months. We look forward to working with them again in the future.

Lindsey Hurst, Marketing & Admissions Manager at Hopwood Hall College

Digital Marketing Specialists

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