Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Responding to the evolving digital landscape of UK Higher Education with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama
Guildhall School of Music & Drama is a thriving international community of musicians, actors, and production artists. Renowned for its exceptional educational programmes, the school ranks in the top ten performing arts institutions in the world. Guildhall recognised the need for a modern and user-friendly website that would not only enhance their online presence, but also align with the evolving digital landscape in higher education.
Challenge
Guildhall School of Music & Drama's previous website faced several limitations. The navigation structure was convoluted, leading to user frustration and hindering the discovery of relevant content. Additionally, the outdated content management system lacked flexibility, making it difficult to create visually appealing and dynamic pages. These challenges were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the need for a responsive and adaptable digital platform.
Approach
We implemented our tried and tested project framework to address Guildhall's challenges and effectively respond to their brief. Collaborative workshops were conducted to understand the school's brand identity and strategic goals. Mood boards were used to explore innovative visual directions that would push the boundaries of how the school might be represented and to create a stunning aesthetic aligned with Guildhall's values.
To tackle the navigation and content challenges, we completely redesigned the website's information architecture. User needs were carefully analysed, and intuitive pathways were designed to guide users towards desired actions, such as course applications and event registrations. We then validated this new information architecture with extensive user testing.
The new website was built using Drupal providing Guildhall with a flexible content management system that enabled their team to create engaging pages and adapt to evolving needs without constant reliance on external support. This enabled them to add a student-to-student marketing tool to faciliate direct converstations between prospective and current students.
Results
The transformation of Guildhall's website yielded substantial results. The visually refreshed design, improved navigation, and flexible content management system significantly enhanced the user experience.
The performance of the website was also substantially improved with the page load time reducing by 21% and the average server response time reducing by 28%.
Visit the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's website
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"A huge thank you to you and the team for leading our project. We’ve been so impressed with the efficiency and responsiveness of your team and how brilliantly Numiko responded to the brief. We’ve just raised a glass in the office here to celebrate and were saying how we feel the site has actually moved our brand on and given us lots of inspiration for carrying the design across other platforms."