Great communication with better education

Volda University College is one of the most popular places to study in the country, located on Norwegian fjords. It has one of the most prestigious programs for journalism studies in Norway, shaping the best journalist talents in the country.

Volda University ambition was to create a multichannel platform that meets the needs of its young students.

Their legacy custom CMS provided a bad experience both to admins and communication recipients. Outdated, hard to use and slow, their CMS stood in the way of attracting new students, informing them about daily affairs and developing the university as a whole.

The project came out of a public tender. The key requirements were:

• A user-centric design with an emphasis on mobile
• Flexible landing pages
• Integration hub for multiple content sources
• Multilingual
• Web content to info screens
• High performance
• A highly effective authoring experience

The solution also had to support a vast amount of API connections, gathering data from study management systems and governmental databases. Frontkom won the public tender and immediately got to work.

As Volda University educates future leading journalists in the country, it became our inspiration for the project.

The idea was to create a CMS that will be the heart of university communication with the potential students and other target groups. Alongside a responsive website and CMS, we utilized a few dozen screens placed around campus to display fresh news and articles for students right where they are and when it’s relevant to them.

When building the solution, we emphasise responsiveness to provide the best experience on mobile devices and campus screens. The successful implementation’s final touch was a series of training sessions for student-journalists on how to publish content on websites.

Close cooperation equals better decisions

Using agile principles, we worked together with HiVolda to clearly define their goals and focus on relevant features.

For the design and content, we used the Core Content Model methodology, to meet organization and student needs in the solution. From a tech point of view for Higher Education, Drupal was an obvious candidate.

Drupal is the industry leader in CMSs for Edu – Top universities worldwide use Drupal successfully for years.

• Drupal shines when there is a huge amount of content, many departments and complex hierarchies.
• It is a tried and tested way to introduce a great search experience.
• Drupal is flexible in regards to integrations, workflows and custom backend UIs.
• Drupal is furthest ahead of all competition, are translation and localization. No other CMS is as feature-complete for multilingual sites as Drupal.

Frontkom is also a creator of Drupal University distribution – Drupal-based solution dedicated to universities. Combining our experience with the right technology, we have delivered an e-solution that perfectly supports our client’s appetite for growth.

Digital presence made for growth

Volda University Students received a fresh, modern, mobile-friendly way to receive relevant news from campus life. University administration and content creators got an easy to use platform to promote their studies and general communication.

We delivered a total package of good user experience, high performance with a measurable positive impact on Volda University organizational goals. Since its launch in 2017, over 800.000 unique users visited the site.

The new solution received:

• 60% more traffic on mobile
• 15% lower bounce rate
• 40% page speed increase

In 2021 our digital journey with the Volda University continues, as we constantly work together on optimization and adding new features building the best digital experience for students in Norway.