Istituto Europeo di Design
Istituto Europeo di Design
Earlier this year, Istituto Europeo di Design came to a conclusion that current state of their website was not corresponding with what they stand for as the institution that shapes new generations of creative people. Site was no longer able to reflect the structure of IED schools, there was no place to showcase plethora of great works done by IED students. There were serious content, logic and navigational problems that had to be solved.
IED decided to take radical steps in order to ensure that their new website becomes fresh, approachable and user friendly. Over a period of time, we communicated closely with them so they could articulate all their needs. In the end, the list was quite long and the work that was awaiting us was incredibly challenging.
Back to the drawing board and attention to details
IED required standardization of all their schools in all of the cities; better service for foreign students which led to differentiation to 3 different domains: ied.edu for English, ied.it for Italian and ied.es for Spanish speaking visitors.
Great attention was given to details and signage, in order to make the user experience a pleasant one - Graphic layouts are featuring big icons and easy to understand overall navigation.
Imperative was to push visual content into the spotlight - galleries, showcases and projects were to be the essence of their site (Management of galleries was done with the help of Slideshow Pro Director). There was a need to put the four schools in the spotlight right from the begining: IED Moda, IED Design, IED Arti Visive and IED Comunicazione - and make them a featured content for each city with their own particularities.
IED also needed seamless communication between their prospective students and management. They wanted it all to be done with open - source technology, such as Wordpress.
Wordpress as CMS
Wordpress was tricky since it has been developed as a blogging platform, aimed at wide variety of users. It offers basic CMS that perfectly suits blogging needs. Expanding Wordpress and modifying it for IED’s needs presented the biggest issue, thus great deal of custom plugins had to be created.
Overall, we managed to achieve all that was required, and some more. IED site turned out great, offering both the simplicity for the old and new users and great communication system for the marketing team.
