How To Create An Award-Winning Website In-House: Australian Christian College
/Chosen because the Australian Christian College - Marsden Park won Gold for Website Homepage, In-House in the 2018 InspirED Brilliance Awards. InspirED interviewed the school’s Group Marketing Manager, David Garden, to learn the story behind this award-winner.
2018 was the first year that the InspirED Brilliance Awards opened entries to schools outside the U.S. and a K-12 coed Christian school from down under grabbed a Gold. Australian Christian College – Marsden Park, Australia took the top seat in the Website Homepage, In-House category.
Strategy first. Who is the Audience?
Australian Christian College is a network of nine Christian Schools in five states across Australia, offering both on campus and online options. David Garden, ACC Group Marketing Manager, outlined the goals for the new website. “Noticing the ongoing increase of prospective parents accessing the school’s website on mobile devices, we wanted to design a mobile-first website to better serve this growing market.”
To start, the in-house team determined the new website would be purpose-built for prospective parents, not existing parents or existing students. “Next, using insights from Hotjar recordings and Google Analytics, we simplified the site by stripping out unpopular content and making popular content more accessible,” David says. “We also designed the site around the user journey and communicated our school’s key points of difference.”
character formation
student improvement showcase
Get to Work with 4 Months to Completion
Copywriting, photography, videography, coding and graphic design was all handled in-house by team members skilled in those areas. From concept to completion, the project took 4 months and saved the school $40,000 (quoted by a digital agency for the rebuild). The project went smoothly, but could have been improved by a more streamlined process for collecting information and photos from the teaching staff. This was the most time-consuming part of the project.
online students
The Payoff: Powerful Results
meet our teachers
David says, “As a result of the new teaching team webpage, we won a new enrollment in the first week of the site going live (the parent told us so)!” In addition, website visitors are up 70.11% in the 2½ months since launch (compared to the same period of the preceding year), session duration is up from 2.21 minutes to 5.54 minutes, and the bounce rate is down from 33.14% to 17.26%.
“Needless to say, we are delighted!”
Bring Home a Gold
The school’s leadership was delighted that their latest website had been acknowledged as an international award winner in the 2018 InspirED School Marketers Brilliance Awards. “It is always great to be acknowledged for a project which has taken hard work to complete,” says David. “It’s an industrial-strength website that achieves the purpose for which it was built: to maximize conversions.”
The Australian Christian College Website Team
David Garden, Marketing Director
Gabrielle Kirk, Enrollments & Marketing Officer
Ricky Hobbs, Web Developer
Bryce Thitchener, Graphic Designer
Iva Motusaga, Photographer & Videographer
Congratulations, Australian Christian College – Marsden Park! You are brilliant!
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Master Electrician, InspirED School Marketers
Master Electrician isn’t just a fun title for me. It’s how I feel about sparking school marketers to do their best work, connecting them to one another, and helping to make their jobs easier. After working with close to 100 schools in the firm I founded — Turnaround Marketing Communications — I realized that school marketers needed a place where they could find brilliant ideas and brain food and feel supported. InspirED School Marketers was born in 2013 to fill that void, and with the help of my fabulous Best Boy, Rob, we are on a quest to make InspirED a resource you can't live without.
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