How To Create An Award-Winning Website In-House: Australian Christian College

Chosen because the Australian Christian College - Marsden Park won Gold for Website Homepage, In-House in the 2018 InspirED Brilliance Awards. InspirED interviewed the school’s Group Marketing Manager, David Garden, to learn the story behind this award-winner.

2018 was the first year that the InspirED Brilliance Awards opened entries to schools outside the U.S. and a K-12 coed Christian school from down under grabbed a Gold. Australian Christian College – Marsden Park, Australia took the top seat in the Website Homepage, In-House category.

Strategy first. Who is the Audience?

Australian Christian College is a network of nine Christian Schools in five states across Australia, offering both on campus and online options. David Garden, ACC Group Marketing Manager, outlined the goals for the new website. “Noticing the ongoing increase of prospective parents accessing the school’s website on mobile devices, we wanted to design a mobile-first website to better serve this growing market.”

To start, the in-house team determined the new website would be purpose-built for prospective parents, not existing parents or existing students. “Next, using insights from Hotjar recordings and Google Analytics, we simplified the site by stripping out unpopular content and making popular content more accessible,” David says. “We also designed the site around the user journey and communicated our school’s key points of difference.”

character formation

student improvement showcase

Get to Work with 4 Months to Completion

Copywriting, photography, videography, coding and graphic design was all handled in-house by team members skilled in those areas. From concept to completion, the project took 4 months and saved the school $40,000 (quoted by a digital agency for the rebuild). The project went smoothly, but could have been improved by a more streamlined process for collecting information and photos from the teaching staff. This was the most time-consuming part of the project.

online students

The Payoff: Powerful Results

meet our teachers

David says, “As a result of the new teaching team webpage, we won a new enrollment in the first week of the site going live (the parent told us so)!” In addition, website visitors are up 70.11% in the 2½ months since launch (compared to the same period of the preceding year), session duration is up from 2.21 minutes to 5.54 minutes, and the bounce rate is down from 33.14% to 17.26%.

“Needless to say, we are delighted!”

— David Garden, ACC Group Marketing Manager

Bring Home a Gold

The school’s leadership was delighted that their latest website had been acknowledged as an international award winner in the 2018 InspirED School Marketers Brilliance Awards. “It is always great to be acknowledged for a project which has taken hard work to complete,” says David. “It’s an industrial-strength website that achieves the purpose for which it was built: to maximize conversions.”

The Australian Christian College Website Team

David Garden, Marketing Director

Gabrielle Kirk, Enrollments & Marketing Officer

Ricky Hobbs, Web Developer

Bryce Thitchener, Graphic Designer

Iva Motusaga, Photographer & Videographer

Congratulations, Australian Christian College – Marsden Park! You are brilliant!

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