Excellent user experience (UX) is a major part of what makes an online business interaction a customer service win. A multitude of companies and services are at the fingertips of anyone who owns a computer or smartphone - 24 hours a day. If a visitor has to spend a long time trying to utilize the information or services on a website... well, they just won’t. They will move on to a competitor whose website meets their needs.
Who is AGI, and Why Did They Need Thinkbean?
American Graphics Institute (AGI) is a licensed school headquartered in the Greater Boston area, offering consulting and technical training in UX, digital publishing, web design, web development, app and game design, and more. The staff at AGI have authored more than 50 books on design, development and publishing, between them.
Regularly scheduled in-person and online courses are a daily service offering for AGI, and they require a robust website with a superior level of accessibility and ease of use. AGI chose the Drupal platform for the same reasons millions of other organizations have — because they needed a fully featured, flexible platform to provide a superior user experience. Specifically, AGI wanted Thinkbean to improve the mobile experience and add e-commerce capabilities to meet the evolving needs of their customers.
Talk to a Drupal expert today to develop or update an amazing website.
Three Features AGI Loves About Their Website
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Menus are clear and organized, allowing visitors to find what they need quickly -
A well-constructed website menu is the road map to all of the information contained within a website. When navigation is well-organized and clear, visitors stay longer and have a more positive view of the company, which ultimately means more converted leads. -
Hyperlinks stand out; It’s obvious what is clickable -
Clear hyperlinks improve the usability and accessibility of information on a website. Just like the menu, hyperlinks must serve as a logical pathway from one part of the site to another. They have to be concise, meaningful and standout from the rest of the page so viewers can spot them easily when skimming. -
Up-to-date ecommerce capability -
Students can now register and pay for classes online. This feature keeps AGI in line with the education industry standard, as institutions need the ability to sell swag, books, and classes online to maintain market reach and stay competitive.
How Did Thinkbean Create AGI’s Amazing Website?
With all of Thinkbean’s Drupal web development projects, the first step to creating a website strategy is Discovery. Thinkbean and AGI used this baseline to craft a solid and complete website strategy for improving the user experience, while making pages more visible to search engines.
Initial planning included:
- Well-organized information architecture
- Use of structured data
- Modern CSS3 and HTML5 interface (for effective display on desktop and mobile)
Some of AGI’s biggest goals were:
- Better usability
- Improve organic traffic and placement on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)
- Give students the ability to register and pay for classes through the site
- Allow users to save classes to a wishlist for later viewing
Previously, the AGI site was a 65 page static site, built with Dreamweaver (no CMS), with no e-commerce integration, no rich snippets, and no unique pages for target key phrases and locations.
Usability:
Thinkbean turned a 65-page hard-coded website into a 9,000+ page, self-sustaining Drupal site. Massive amounts of data relationships were created with great care for UX. The site is responsive, with an intuitive user interface (UI) that improves the user experience exponentially.
Improving SEO & SERP:
Thinkbean structured the site with proper taxonomy, SEO-friendly URL architecture and title tags, meta tags, Schema Structured Data and other best practices. AGI now boasts multiple, high-ranking, page 1 results with excellent rich snippets on Google’s organic SERPs for relevant terms. Thinkbean utilized Drupal’s strong technical foundation for SEO, as well as their extensive knowledge of module customization to garner such strong results for AGI. In other words, Thinkbean nailed it.
Creating Easy Registration:
Users can not only easily search for, locate, and save classes they want to take, they can register and pay for them, too. Drupal’s advanced taxonomy classification system makes organization simpler for websites with larger amounts of content, like AGI. Additionally, Thinkbean’s improvements to navigation and UX means students can easily locate and purchase related courses, as well as view past certificates of completion.
Wishlist:
Enticing students to dream about all the courses they’d love to take is an important aspect of customer (student) retention and satisfaction, an important goal for any business. Creating a wishlist (as Thinkbean did for AGI’s students) where they can save courses they want to take in the future is an excellent way to achieve this goal.
Talk to a Drupal expert today to develop or update an amazing website
Did Thinkbean Meet AGI’s Goals?
Yes! AGI chose Drupal because of its ability to handle complex data associations with ease, the abundance of contributed modules and the potential for customization. AGI chose Thinkbean because of their Drupal expertise and advanced programming capabilities, allowing in-depth module customization, and providing access to valuable new features. Not to mention, their ability to create an amazing webdev strategy.
Drupal’s capabilities were leveraged to achieve an ideal custom web development and design project for AGI. In the future, clean upgrade paths will help keep AGI functioning every time updates are released. Thinkbean creates amazing websites for organizations like AGI, with an endless variety of custom functionality.
Thinkbean’s advanced Drupal web development skills allow educational institutions to establish a user-friendly web presence, achieve business goals, and exceed the needs and expectations of their users.
Read other case studies of our most interesting Drupal 8 projects to discover how we can help you reach your web development goals - or talk to a Drupal expert. Find the right Drupal development team and get it right the first time.
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