Case studies

acl (Australian Centre for Languages)

Web solution provides answer to ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’

Background
acl is the largest private provider of English language education in Australia and an internationally recognised leader in the development of English language teaching resources and support services.

As well as teaching international students at its Sydney campus, it delivers a major component of the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP), an Australian education program that contributes to the successful settlement of newly arrived migrants and refugees. It also delivers training offshore through ventures in Vietnam, China and Thailand and a growing number of international partnerships, and develops and licenses acl’s flagship aclEnglish products and services for online and distance teaching and learning of English language and study skills.

Challenge
The rapid growth of various divisions within the company had resulted in the development of four different websites, which lacked consistency of design and technology, thus undermining consistency of branding and marketing messages. In a number of cases pages were excessively long, resulting in one of the company’s managers asking us to ‘fix up the dead sea scrolls’.

Most importantly, the old sites did not adequately convey the scale and substance of the whole organisation, nor explain clearly the relationship between its different divisions and their activities.

acl turned to us initially for a solution that would consolidate and strengthen its web presence and online brand image in one of its divisions.

A user-friendly and economically priced content management system was also a key requirement, to enable the company’s staff to make web updates quickly and easily without reliance on external specialists. While the need for improved control over content and design had become urgent, it needed to be delivered as simply and economically as possible, as whatever system was implemented was likely ultimately to be superseded by a large-scale organisation-wide knowledge and content management system.

Solution
It quickly became apparent that, to achieve a more integrated look and feel while nevertheless retaining one of the four existing sites within the new structure, more than an isolated redesign of one division’s site was needed.

Following an evaluation of various proprietary and custom content management systems, Macromedia Contribute was selected as a flexible yet low-cost content management tool.

The new design consisted of a corporate portal that made clear the breadth of the organisation and its divisions. A common architecture was applied to the portal level and to each of the new site sections, with in-built flexibility to accommodate different types and structures of information relevant to each part of the business. A template-based approach was adopted to ensure consistent presentation of content and to encourage and facilitate the maintenance of consistency once the client took over content maintenance and updates.