Competition for students, research funding and business support is huge amongst the top 100 universities in the UK. So imagine how competitive it gets when you introduce competition from universities across the world! The web is a perfect shop window to attract international students and promote the university. Brookes already had a good web site and our research showed people generally found it useful - but how could they make it even better.

We wanted to talk to as many different people as possible to understand what worked on the site, what didn't work and what more Brookes could offer. We undertook strategic interviews, ran workshops with academic and support staff, ran an online survey with over 1,200 current site users. We also reviewed sites of all Brookes' major competitors and combined this with a usability review of their own site.

All this was drawn together into a step-by-step strategy for improvement, that was practical to implement and that would tackle Brookes' top priorities first. Bringing the staff of the university on board was critical to this project's success and the final presentation to over 100 web stakeholders from the University proved that the process and recommendations were right. In fact one observer said 'Its nice to see a consultation project where not only were we consulted but someone actually listened!'

The strategy has enabled Brookes to start a process of improvement with a clear 3 year delivery plan.

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