Australian Pacific College

Australian Pacific College (APC) operates 12 campuses across four states, providing high quality vocational programs to students of 120+ different nationalities who come to study in Australia. They specialise in creating pathways to employment opportunities and further education from their vocational courses of study.

The APC website was dated and difficult for those managing it to update regularly, particularly for course details, start dates and outlines. With nearly 70 courses to maintain in total, their team needed a more efficient way to manage this and also wanted students to be able to more easily browse courses, narrow down their options and keep track of those they wanted to consider and apply for.

To make matters more complex, APC's award-winning sister school English Unlimited also had its own website detailing the English language courses they offer to international students. However much of the content on this site duplicated what was on the APC site – campus information, studying in Australia, the student experience and more. 

The challenge was to create a new combined website that was more streamlined to manage and more useful for prospective students. With the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic behind them, APC was keen to be ready to attract the next cohorts of international students looking to study in Australia. 

With two large websites and both administrative and end-user needs to consider, it was important to start this project with a Discovery phase. In-depth stakeholder interviews were conducted and user personas developed to guide the rest of the project. Journey mapping was used to plan out key user flows through the new website, then translated into a wireframe prototype. A comprehensive information architecture was developed to determine a clear, user-centred way to organise and present content and functionality about both Australian Pacific College and English Unlimited's offerings.

Detailed visual designs were then developed for every page template the new site would need, which guided our development team on the build of the site. The end result is an engaging, user-centred website with intuitive navigation and powerful search and filtering of available courses. Individual course pages are rich with detail including course summaries, outlines, related careers, university pathways, start dates, sample timetables, student stories and and entry requirements, all presented clearly and in a visually engaging way. Students can save courses to a shortlist, complete their application online, chat with the student support team, and adjust accessibility settings.

Behind the scenes, the website management team now have a much streamlined process for maintaining content, in particular enabling regularly updated brochure and course outline PDFs to be replaced in one centralised file repository, saving many hours of manually updating individual course pages with new PDF files every time.