Drummond Education

Challenge

Drummond Education, together with Fitness Professionals, is the leading training provider in the exercise and fitness industry. As a centre of excellence for exercise and fitness, we are the only training provider in the UK that is validated by Central YMCA Qualifications, Active IQ and Fitness Professionals.

Drummond needed to redesign their website – visual improvement as well as better functionality.

The main objectives were to:

• Brighten up the colour scheme
• Provide each section with solid imagery
• Give users a home page with a related starting-points
• Implement an extensible CMS
• Allow users to enrol/enquire about courses
• Students only section (username and password protection)

Solution

Design

Since I designed and developed their old site – it was a good start. Their old colour scheme was a mix of beige to brown. In terms of design, I wanted to give Drummond a refresh bright look with big imagery. I thought it would give a solid sense of energy and would depart from the corporate feel.

I got feedback about the previous site and most users were happy about the simplicity of it – not too busy just the right amount of information. So I took this on board while I was sketching out my ideas.

Where to go?

I thought it was important to give users direction from the home page. So I created an intro panel that starts with “I want to…”. Since there were three different levels I included relevant copy for each of them. I was hoping the users that came onto the site would connect with what the copy and know where to go.

Promotion, promotion, promotion!

One of the main aspects that the old site lacked was a promotional area which was available on every page. This way Drummond could be sure no matter where the user came from they would have to opportunity to highlight any offers.

Development

A complete revamp was needed, was as well a departure from their legacy CMS onto a well-known one. One with good extensibility and documentation to help Drummond along the way.

WordPress

Using this blogging software with its sophisticated article management. It was possible to create a CMS which allowed different types of data entry dependent on its category.

WordPress Plugins

Plugins were created for each different section of the website to capture extra meta data.

Google maps

Instead of displaying the venues via a list or graphic image – a better approach was to use a familiar mapping API. This way no further work would have to be carried out if Drummond choose to add another venue.

With the extra meta data captured from the venues posts it was possible to plot pointers onto Google maps API. If logos were uploaded, that image was also placed into Google maps’ “speech bubble”.