University College Dublin, Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School: website review and recommendations

The Michael Smurfit Business School at University College Dublin is Ireland's leading business school and research centre. Catering to an international postgraduate audience, the School's website needs to maintain and support the prestigious reputation of the wider university as well as providing a useful and useable experience for prospective students.

The UCD Smurfit School website was launched in September 2017 following a comprehensive research, consultation and design process. Since then, the website had been updated on an ongoing basis and a series of new features and functionalities have been developed as and when required.

Due to ongoing developments in the wider student recruitment space since the website launched, the School was keen to review and audit the site to ensure it was optimised to deliver against their objectives.

To help with this, Pickle Jar Communications carried out a comprehensive website review. This included an audit of 100 website pages, analysis of website analytics data, a review of competitor websites, and interviews and user tests with the target audience. 

The final report brought together all these aspects to provide a list of priority recommendations for improvement, in areas such as content, information architecture, technical functionality, and ongoing measurement and evaluation. 

Photo credit to University College Dublin.