Bespoke: A CMS to administer and sell University Courses

January 2014

A custom CMS to enable structured storage and personalised presentation of courses from Graduate Schools across the University of Melbourne

The challenge

University courses are quite complicated products to sell. They have multiple options and varying requirements depending on whether you are a domestic or international student, fees that are quite difficult to calculate and relatively complicated admissions processes. The web is also the channel most people use to find out about their opptions for university study. I developed a way for The University of Melbourne to do this in a more sophisticated way.

The solution

As the Web Marketing Director I was responsible for inventing, promoting and then building a multisite CMS called Bespoke.

Using a combination of structured data, Rails engines and a gorgeous, user-focused design, Bespoke is now responsible for serving over 8 Faculty and Graduate School websites and is the primary information channel for prospective students to learn about University courses.

Bespoke allows for:

Research-backed presentation of course information
Fully responsive web design to ensure a brilliant mobile browsing experience
Content customisation based off geography (for example, we can show Chinese student testimonials to people visiting the site from China) to improve conversion rates
Re-usable content blocks created to ensure a smooth user experience without sacrificing maintainability (also enabling the ability to “C.O.P.E.” (Create once, publish everywhere))
Integration with several internal and external APIs and services, including our CRM, events calendar, twitter and a live chat service.

Results

Bespoke has been widely adopted by Graduate Schools (who are able to choose their technology) because of it's unique combination of features and effectiveness. It is now widely used and actively developed.

Some of the sites currently running in Bespoke include: