We are very excited to announce that the new Save the Student website is now live!
http://www.savethestudent.org/
Save the Student is the number 1 student money website in the UK and they came to us last year to revitalise their site. Started in 2007 by savvy student Owen Burek, the site has gone from strength to strength over the years but was in need of an update.
With thousands of pages, daily updates and an excellent Google ranking to maintain, this project was no walk in the park. Our Head of Development, Darren Johnson oversaw the entire project and was heavily involved planning the technical side of the project. Once the designs were signed off, the development team planned every aspect of the site to make sure that none of the historical articles were lost and the functionality we were introducing would be only beneficial to the Save the Student team.
Alienating regular readers with a drastically different site was a big no-no so our design team created a concept that remained in line with the existing Save the Student brand but with a modernised look and feel. The Save the Student purple is used throughout the website and is complimented by strong colours used to differentiate between each section.
With thousands of legacy articles data migration was the biggest risk in this project. Our development team started the project with an initial migration of data so they were working with real content. Over the months, Save the Student continued to update their current site with their articles as the new website came together. After several rounds of rigorous testing it was time to impose a content freeze on the live site, run a final data migration and put the site live. Going live with a site of this size with such a high volume of traffic requires thorough planning. We started go live early in the morning because stereotypically, Save the Student’s traffic starts to peak after lunchtime! All went smoothly and by midday the new website was up and running!
The Save the Student site went live at the end of April and we’re looking forward to seeing the impact it has over the next few months. We loved working with the Save the Student team and are extremely proud of the result of 6 months hard work on the new site. We even picked up a few money saving ideas along the way!