Challenge & Objectives
Athona originally came to us for the Support & Maintenance of their old website, which had been built by a different agency.
They soon outgrew the site they had, as it was hard to navigate and difficult to integrate with their internal systems.
Although the previous website was responsive, the navigation structure was unable to handle the number of new pages being added. The site had a great deal of duplicate content as the team sometimes accidentally created duplicate pages, as the website’s front and backend structure became a minefield to navigate.
They approached us to build them a new website, better tailored to their business. Alongside this, they selected one of our Evolve plans, so that we are on hand to grow their website with their business.
Solution
We delivered a WordPress powered responsive website, helping to redefine the navigation and website architecture, improving user journeys and laying foundations so that the website and navigation could easily scale.
The brief was specific that the new website had to show a clear divide between Healthcare and Education, which is what we designed and developed allowing their users to be shown only their interested field.
The marketing team at Athona worked with an external video company to capture videos and stills of their offices, which have been implemented in the headers of the main service pages within the website.
Post launch, Impact worked with an SEO partner to ensure the website included standard SEO practices, in which it did and Athona’s marketing team worked through pages to provide independent copy and images throughout.
Custom Integrations
A key requirement, which had been difficult with their old site, was integration with their recruitment technologies. We created custom integrations with Broadbean and Idibu to give them the seamless connection between their different systems that they had been after.
This allowed them to pull multiple job feeds for each of their specialist divisions, reducing staff time when pushing their new positions to all of the job boards, and roles only needed adding once, with the website doing the rest.
Customer Login Area
We created an easy to use login area for users to securely upload their CV’s, apply for roles and manage requests.
Events Personalisation
As part of the original build Impact included an events area for the exhibitions/open days that Athona attend for both their Healthcare and Education sectors. Importantly, we were able to show all events on the homepage however when visiting dedicated sections of the website, only the associated events would be listed, meaning someone who is in healthcare would not be shown education based events.
These events have since evolved with offering for online/virtual events, however the platform was built with extensibility in mind, meaning Athona can use the system to provide access to online ticket systems/securing seats at webinars.
News Personalisation
The same applies with the News for all users whether logged in or not, that they could view news posts within their chosen section. The homepage showed all news posts but once inside you could view only what you were interested in, whether that be Education or Healthcare. There was also a logged in benefit that could select as a preference which news/events you would see once logged in.
Refining Job Searches
As an Evolve task at a later date, we implemented an additional feature that allowed Athona’s candidates to search for jobs by their location. Impact designed and developed an improved search functionality which encompassed geo-location coding so the search could be precise to how many miles radius from them the job was positioned.
Work With Us
Other Evolve tasks include a “Work With Us” area which is a dedicated area for working at Athona rather than within one of their dedicated recruitment sectors. A full HR content breakdown into specified sections allowing their own employees to review documents and also an evolving area to advertise working for Athona.
The jobs for internal positions also use Broadbean, so the job advertising journey is seamless for the team at Athona, to use one third party dashboard to upload all jobs.
Technology & Plugins
Aside from WordPress, the website uses Gravity Forms to manage form data and personalisation.
It is integrated with Broadbean Jobs and Idibu, and uses Google Maps API for job searches.
WPBakery is used for easy on-brand page building for the Athona team.
Events Calendar Pro is used for the management of Athona’s events and webinars.
Yoast is included to simplify on-page optimisation for the client’s SEO agency, and as standard Google Analytics and Tag Manager.
