Background
JMC Academy has been training Australia's creative industries for more than 40 years, with campuses in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and courses spanning music, audio engineering, film and television, animation, game design, visual communication and entertainment business management.
Its website had grown through several iterations across different content management systems, and by the time Webcoda came on board the platform was working against the marketing team rather than for it. Course information was difficult to keep consistent across campuses, the existing Kentico build no longer matched how the team wanted to work day to day, and prospective students had no clear path from browsing a discipline to making an enquiry about it.
For a provider whose enrollments depend on the strength of that first impression, the site had become the weakest link in the admissions journey.
Solution
Webcoda started with research rather than a design. Surveys, stakeholder interviews, competitor analysis and user testing were used to map how people actually go about choosing a creative course, and those journeys set the information architecture before any visual work began.
The new site was built on Umbraco CMS, with content migrated across from Kentico and restructured so a single course record drives every place that course appears, from discipline landing pages to campus and intake listings. Umbraco Forms handles course enquiries and event registrations, and Umbraco Deploy keeps content and schema moving cleanly between environments. The design leans on video and photography throughout, which suits an audience that wants to see the studios and facilities before it reads about them.
The most significant piece of the build was integrating the site with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so an enquiry submitted on any form is passed straight into JMC's marketing journeys instead of sitting in an inbox waiting to be transcribed.
Impact
JMC's marketing team now runs its own website. Course updates, intake dates and campus news are published in Umbraco without developer involvement, and because course data is modelled once, a change made in one place is correct everywhere it appears.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration turned the site from a brochure into the top of the admissions funnel. Enquiries arrive in the marketing platform with the context of what the person was looking at, which lets JMC follow up while interest is still fresh.
Consolidating onto a single Umbraco instance also ended the fragmentation of the previous multi-CMS history, and gave JMC a platform Webcoda has continued to extend since launch.
