Delivering Websites-as-a-Service

Background

UP Education is a leading provider of tertiary education in New Zealand. It provides training courses under 22 different mastheads across Australia and New Zealand and is on an aggressive growth trajectory, with plans to acquire and integrate more brands over the coming years

The website for each provider brand plays a critical role in marketing UP Education's many different courses and onboarding and engaging students. The integrity of the data presented to visitors, the quality of the marketing story and the performance of the sites are all critical success factors for UP Education. 

Each time UP Education acquires a new provider, they rebrand and re-platform their website to reduce the internal cost of running the site. By consolidating all their sites onto a single content management solution, UP Education can control the experience users get and eliminate the risk that sites deliver incomplete or erroneous content, which is a compliance risk for them.

Centralizing 22 websites onto a single content platform that delivers excellent performance, reliable back-end integration and allows new sites to be added quickly, easily, and cheaply is a non-trivial challenge both technically and practically. 

UP Education identified the following vendor selection criteria for their consolidation platform:

• High-performing websites with excellent PageSpeed scores

• Compliance with the organization's cybersecurity policies.

• Easy, fast content management and production of new pages and content.

• Reliable integration with existing enterprise systems, third-party platforms and other MarTech tools already being used in the organization.

• Cloud-based solution.

• Smallest possible internal IT footprint (owned and run by marketing) whilst complying with corporate IT policies.

• Ability to add new sites quickly and predictably

"At the core of the requirement was the ability to quickly and easily add new web properties to the portfolio. To achieve this, it was clear UP Education needed to adopt an API-first content platform coupled with a robust frontend and integration solution that avoided the requirement to custom-code a frontend every time they acquired a new business."

Why UP Education chose Octana + Contentful

• 01

  It gives them the repeatability they need without the overhead of custom coding front ends

• 02

  It delivers the performance, scalability, integration points and authoring tools they need to run the business efficiently

• 03

  It allows all sites to be managed out of their existing Azure instance

• 04

  It has a low IT maintenance overhead and cost and thus allows budget to flow to places where it can be used to grow and accelerate the business (eg Media)

• 05

  It gives marketing the ownership and power to create campaigns and pages (that integrate to existing MarTech stack) without needing any involvement from IT

Overall, the implementation delivered an incredible ROI and is an essential enabler in UP Education’s scaling strategy. The company currently has 10 sites running on the solution supported by a team of content authors across Australia and New Zealand.

"Adding new sites can now be achieved in days, not weeks or months, with a predictable fixed cost and timeframe allowing the organization to respond quickly to new market opportunities. "