Growing the online presence for the leading land-based university

As New Zealand’s leading land-based university, Lincoln University gives students a place to grow, prepare for the real world and plant the seeds of a rewarding future. Their website acts as a vital channel that demonstrates their strong international reputation and why they’re the right choice for potential new students.

After identifying that they needed a new site that would meet their evolving needs, Lincoln went out to market to find an agency to redesign, rebuild, and securely host their website. They were looking for a long-term partnership with an agency that could work alongside their digital strategy.

Through a rigorous selection process period, the team at Lincoln chose to partner with Silverstripe to work on a solution that keeps students at the core of what they’re offering.

In the beginning stages of the project, our Strategy & Design team worked with Lincoln to determine what they were looking for when it came to a new online experience for students and their CMS users. The solution needed to be fit for purpose and appropriately sized for the university. This meant an easy-to-use experience within the CMS so the website could be actively maintained by their content teams as well as being highly functional and engaging for the people who would use the site, including students and researchers as well as many other groups.

With a thorough discovery and design phase that covered user testing, information architecture, and modern visual designs, our team was able to establish what needed to be built for the new Lincoln site. Through our Agile way of working, the project allowed our teams to effectively collaborate and develop the site at the same time as the designs were reviewed and the content was being created.

Using Silverstripe CMS as a foundation, we were able to take advantage of the modular content structure to create custom content blocks. The drag-and-drop functionality gives content authors the freedom to structure content on a page while adhering to the website’s design guidelines. Content blocks have helped future proof the design of the site and make it easy to expand the features and functionality, depending on the needs of the team and the future needs of users.

Building a website for a university meant developing features and integrations that were unique to their specific needs. The single largest feature that was built for Lincoln was an integration with PeopleSoft—the university's student management system (SMS). The integration built by our development teams allows a significant amount of data to be pulled from the SMS directly into Silverstripe CMS, acting as a single source of truth.

The team at Lincoln also wanted to update their map implementation as it was no longer a cohesive experience for their users. With a clear vision of what they wanted for the map feature, it allowed our development teams to improve the map functionality through the use of highly intuitive user interactions supported by an engaging set of designs. They were able to use Silverstripe CMS with a Google Maps API to deliver a robust map experience while giving the content editors for Lincoln the ability to manage and maintain the campus map with ease.

Silverstripe was able to successfully deliver a new and improved experience online for the team at Lincoln University and their site users. From the day the new website launched, it’s been well-received across the organisation and serves to promote interest and increase engagement with Lincoln. In the longer term it's hoped that the new site will also increase the number of applications to study at Lincoln.

With an enhanced feature set that includes a new map functionality, a better search solution, updated designs, and a more performant site, anyone using the website now has easier access to discover and be part of what Lincoln has to offer.

• Workshops
• Discovery
• Wireframing
• UX & design
• Front and back end web development
• Dedicated testing resource
• Ongoing UX & UI discussions
• Project Management
• Solution Architect consultation
• Programme Management
• Account Management
• Managed cloud hosting
• 24/7 New Zealand-based support