La Salle Campus Barcelona: an award-winning website, worthy of a cutting-edge campus

La Salle Campus Barcelona is one of the founding centres of Universitat Ramon Llull: a private, modern and very dynamic university specialising in engineering, architecture, business and technology, with a Barcelona campus designed for innovation and an increasingly international community. In 2015 it invited us to submit a proposal to completely renew its web ecosystem.

La Salle is a university built around technology, process and innovation, which runs pioneering competitions and has a modern campus. Its website reflected none of that: neither its image nor its capabilities matched the institution, and it needed a deep change.

The new website had to align with the campus and the university's values, organise a huge amount of information for very different audiences and, as a private university, become a tool for recruiting students. All of it connected to the university's internal systems, which feed the academic information the institution is required to publish.

We started by researching the websites of many institutions, their good and bad practices, and working closely with a large number of university departments. Together we identified the audiences, organised the content into taxonomies and analysed the original information architecture. From that we created a new content tree built on three axes: the information that needed organising, the audiences the website addresses and its ranking and recruitment goals.

On that basis we designed the navigation, the desktop and mobile wireframes and a functional document covering the whole site's logic, and developed the creative concept and graphic system for the new website. In development, on Drupal, we integrated it with the academic management system to automatically load all the information the university must display, with its CRM in the master's programme forms and with other internal systems, and defined a governance model with roles, processes and standards for the editorial team. We also built a multisite architecture that brought together the whole organisation's blog ecosystem. The new website was published in May 2017.

We then stayed by its side so the website could evolve with its needs: new features for degree programmes, a full SEO audit and a measurement plan with analytics. And we opened parallel projects, such as the international portal La Salle Universities, which brings together the network's campuses, and the Universitat Oberta La Salle website.