Education Scotland

Website platform migration and refresh

Education Scotland are charged with supporting and improving education for learners of all ages in Scotland: from early learning, child care and schools to community learning and development.

Their website was no longer supporting their needs, so they asked us to build them a new site with improved reliability and responsiveness, that would meet accessibility guidelines, whilst being easy for their content editors to update, including the ability to support bilingual content (English and Gaelic).

Our team looked at their needs and requirements and suggested a complete structural redesign and move to an Umbraco Content Management System (CMS), hosted on Microsoft Azure. They liked our vision, and we were able to create a site that works for both Education Scotland and their thousands of users.

CHALLENGES

  • improve site reliability
  • AA compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2, whilst keeping the look and feel of their brand
  • migrate a large amount of content and media from the existing site on SharePoint to the new site on Umbraco
  • seamlessly redirect users to the new locations of migrated content and media

THE SOLUTION

  • we built Azure architecture that allows load balancing and geo-replication, ensuring high availability of the site
  • smart use of colour, defined using CSS styling, allowed the site to be AA compliant whilst maintaining their brand look
  • bespoke scripts to migrate the data from the SharePoint site to the new Umbraco site
  • HTTP Handlers and content finders to seamlessly redirect users to the new site locations

OUTCOMES AND BENEFITS

  • reduced costs on hosting and third party firewalls
  • reliable with no reported downtime
  • improved editing experience; content editors can improve and expand content as and when required
  • improved accessibility and responsiveness
  • improved search experience for users

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