Building a website to meet global demand for online learning
The pandemic caused an unprecedented shift to online learning and one year on we see evidence for this ongoing global demand on our own new bespoke online courses website.
LTW’s Online Course Production team collaborated with Website and Communications to create the new site which makes it easier for prospective learners to find courses that best suit their needs. Users can view courses grouped by subject area or filter the search results by platform, difficulty level, subject or language. The goal of the website is to connect users with courses they are interested in, so we are ultimately driving users to click on a link to an external partner course site.
Using Google Analytics, and benchmarking against activity on the old website, we tracked the proportion of visitors to the site who clicked on an external course platform link. The results demonstrate that in January to March this year, 24% more visitors than in the same period last year clicked through to find out more about a course. This data demonstrates that the work undertaken to construct and design the new site has been worthwhile. Our approach was informed by regular user testing which put the expectations and requirements of prospective learners at the fore. The website was built in the Drupal CMS to take advantage of latest search, indexing and editorial features available on this popular open-source platform. As well as being an optimised, fast-loading website, the user experience is consistent with the central University website.