Edinburgh University puts the needs of its students at the heart of everything they do. So when Gecko was asked to create a new website that was not only a comprehensive resource to support students looking to stay and study in Edinburgh, but also bring to life what the City of Edinburgh has to offer, then we had to do the same.
The sheer scale of what they offer can be overwhelming and this was reflected in the amount of content the original website had surmounted over the years. Therefore our first port of call was to work closely with the team on a full content audit and site restructure.
We had to make sure the site was fast, the content was easy to find and the branding was seamlessly integrated with the rest of Edinburgh Universities' digital assets even though it was running from a separate Umbraco CMS.
As we mentioned before, the ACE website had to exist and sit within the wider Edinburgh Universities' digital assets. This influenced elements such as the font and colour themes throughout the site.
The purpose of the new site was to provide a resource to support students looking to stay and study in Edinburgh. To bring this to life, we opted for stand-out photography, used in the header banners and throughout the pages.
Accessibility for this site needed to be WCAG 2.1 compliant. This is the highest level of accessibility and it was important the website was built following these guidelines to ensure web content is more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities and photosensitivity.
The new ACE site was an upgrade from Umbraco 7.2.8 to 8.11. To move existing content across, we used CMS Import and generated custom XMLs, as the Umbraco providers do not exist for CMS imports to Umbraco 8. Doing it this way gave us a great level of control of which data we needed and what format we needed it in.
