Cranfield School of Management (SOM) initially engaged Creative Jar to architect, design and develop a new website. With over 11,000 pages, the site had grown organically over a number of years and was difficult to maintain and manage. Creative Jar needed to ensure minimum downtime in the changeover.

The school has a large number of stakeholders and departments, with each department having its own collateral, marketing and budgets. SOM wanted to present a universal identity and it was essential that the new website delivered this whilst still providing flexibility where required.

Cranfield SOM is one of the top ranked business schools in the UK and the website needed to demonstrate this. The site needed to be modern and easy to use, plus a range of web tools, such as CV and search, would need to be in place.

In order to assess the schools needs, gain buy-in and to guarantee that the SOM brand would be prevalent throughout, Creative Jar held a series of workshops with all the departmental stakeholders. Due to the number of stakeholders and the size of the undertaking a branded project room was set up onsite at Cranfield for everyone to view the progress of the project.

The first phase of the project had a number of key deliverables; to quickly implement a new online look and feel, to empower departmental stakeholders to manage their own online content and to preserve the integrity of the existing site content.

The site hierarchy was consolidated and redefined into a new, scalable structure that would accommodate future growth. Key landing points across the website were identified and page templates designed to unify the brand and standardise entry.

A bespoke Content Management System (CMS) was developed in .NET to manage and maintain the site. The CMS, designed with the user in mind, was easy to use regardless of technical ability and supported multiple user profiles and logins.

By creating a “crawler” application, Creative Jar could easily distinguish URLs and broken links from the original site. Using the crawler, all of the 11,000 pages were pulled across from the old site, ensuring minimal down-time in the switch-over.

Once the content and data were pulled across into the new SOM website phase two began. Working hand-in-hand with the SOM internal team additional content templates were created and the new look and feel rolled out across the rest of the website.

To produce a world class website to rival other business schools, Rich Media, Flash and web 2.0 features such as video and audio, were added to the site along with an innovative search solution that categorises results against media type and relevancy.