Building an Updated Website Experience for a Top Business School

Located in Vancouver, Canada, Beedie, an extension of Simon Fraser University, is one of the world's top 100 business schools for academic research.

What was the goal of the project?

SFU Beedie School of Business knew they had a big task on their hands when they realized their monster of a website had grown to an uncontrollable size and was not providing the services needed to its students and staff.

Its outdated appearance and almost labyrinth-like structure meant that prospective students were pushed to their limits simply trying to find the most basic information online. They decided it was time for a total website overhaul, thus enlisting the services of Goat.

Their site had:

• Lots of APIs integrations.
• Lots and lots of pages.

And

• It had to balance website customization while making sure the client didn't redundantly input information.

As with any institutional organization of this size, working with stakeholders from each faculty of the Business School meant juggling a long list of priorities and expectations. By building the site in Craft, we were able to provide SFU with a framework of editable components; allowing the internal digital team to maintain complete control when managing content for each unique program. It was really amazing to see a project that at first felt fragmented, very quickly transform into a congruent hub of information that served a purpose. With the finished product, SFU was given a tool that allowed professors and students alike to view the programs offered with a more harmonious approach.

Why Craft?

There was only one CMS that would make a build of this size manageable for both parties involved - the team of designers and developers at Goat, and the content strategists at SFU. Craft provided a solution that allowed Goat to easily structure the site around a meticulously planned hierarchy of information which became the backbone of the new site. In addition, the decision to build the site in Craft using a modular component building process provided SFU staff with just enough control to safely manage content uploading at this scale. The combination of the two helped to see this website take shape in just over three months.

What integrations were used in the build?

The team at Goat built a handful of custom integrations including:

• A WordPress hook to pull in and sort Wordpress posts for legacy WordPress sites that still exist in the SFU Ecosystem
• API hooks to pull in custom faculty information from SFU's proprietary Business Management software, allowing research and Faculty information to remain in sync
• Form integration to send submissions to SalesForce, e-mails, and databases
• WYSIWYG CSS customizations

What is your team most proud of when it comes to this project? ?

• This project was a huge accomplishment in terms of a Craft build, large business site for large higher education client
• The team learned a lot about the capabilities of Craft, and will take these lessons into future projects
• We can share the scale of the project and how short a time it was completed in, Craft made it easy complete work in terms of its features