The challenge
Showcasing theatre talent
Guildford School of Acting is part of the University of Surrey and is one of the most highly regarded theatre schools in the UK. They wanted to employ our help in updating their website styling and design. Their branding and design concepts were already in the hands of Glassup and Stoski: a creative design and marketing agency based in Surrey.
The solution
Design meets development
We worked in partnership with Glassup and Stoski, taking their high-level design concepts and rolling them out into the website development process. In short, we gave their design concepts a platform. We developed the website using Drupal which is a Content Management System (CMS) highly valued by high-end businesses, educational institutes and governmental organisations.
GSA boasts a community of creative individuals and we’ve provided them with a website that compliments this and their branding. For this reason, we designed the site to rely heavily on visual storytelling. Each page displays a number of relevant, high-quality images that illustrate the written content. The images themselves were taken by GSA and focused on students creating and performing at the university.
There are a huge variety of courses offered by GSA. Each course page needed to be informative, accurate and specific to that course. For this reason, we had extensive discussions about how we could display all of the course details in a clear and concise way.
In the end, we decided to place the most important information right at the top, enabling potential students to easily view the important information about each course, such as course length and UCAS code.
The primary purpose of the website was to provide information for potential students who are interested in attending the university. For this reason, it was important that the navigation on the site was logical and intuitive. We reorganised the categories in the main navigation bar, allowing users to find their desired courses quicker. As well as this, we also ensured that the homepage was full of links to other parts of the website while remaining image-rich.
The results
Evolving the Style of GSA
The GSA website functions well and serves its purpose as a brochure website. The tone of voice, and especially image tone, fits the school very well and helps to illustrate the written content. Despite having finished this project, we have continued to work with GSA on website maintenance and content updates.
