A major web overhaul for Middlesex
Middlesex University have an enviable location. Great career support. A diverse and welcoming community. But you wouldn’t have known it from their website. The university wanted a fresh start with a new site that captures everything special about the institution.
Challenge
The ambitious scale of the project was the biggest challenge. Hundreds of pages. Dozens of content owners. Years of additions and alterations. The team at Middlesex needed help to make sense of the existing content and refine their approach for creating new content to go with the new design.
What we did
Completed an extensive audit
Before the web project team came together, no one had oversight of the entire website. So the site was a jumble of different content, sometimes even the same content duplicated in different places. We reviewed pages across the site against multiple criteria including readability, accessibility, SEO and tone of voice.
Integrated into the project team
The project team were the driving force behind the development of the site. But sometimes having an external eye can help identify problems that might get missed. We attended weekly meetings with the team to catch up on progress and give our insight into what should happen next.
Defined an approach
The new copy had to meet multiple goals. For example, it had to be accessible. It had to be minimal to work with the new page design. It had to capture the strategic aims for Middlesex. Through style samples and multiple iterations, we helped the team agree on what this looked like in practice.
Crafted fresh copy
After our audit, we had a clear sense of which areas of the website needed the most work. In collaboration with the project team, we identified they key pages that needed our creative input in the form of new copy and a new approach. We wrote many of the top-level pages that guide users around the site.
“You and your team have been a crucial part of the journey for us, and we are very grateful for all the team has done as part of the project."
Head of Digital Marketing (Interim)
Middlesex University
The results
The Middlesex web project team completed a huge task within a short timeframe. A Thousand Monkeys were there throughout the initial stages of the project to help make the content work with the new design, meet the strategic goals for the university and present an accurate reflection of the great work they do.
