THE CHALLENGE
Currently, Hutong school has 4 websites in total:
- Hutong-school.com: the main site, providing information on their courses, internship opportunities for Chinese and international students who are seeking an internship in China
- Blog.hutong-school.com: the specialized blog site for their articles
- Hutong School’s CRM: the site to control information of their current students, which includes students' background information, their contacts, course registration, internship applications, etc.
- Internasia.com: providing information of internship opportunities, acknowledging users of the locations and programs being featured before they move on to the provider's website.
As a fast-growing institution, managing their websites with efficiency is crucial for Hutong school, especially since the 4 websites are built on very different platforms: Drupal 7, WordPress, and Symfony 2.
In short, Hutong School needed to have an optimal maintenance solution for their digital operations, aligning the websites to the latest design guidelines, as well as having a complete and easy method to control their database, especially with thousands of visitors per day.
The Solution
A strong digital partnership is essential for any fast-growing, fast-evolving website. This is even more true for Hutong school, who must constantly develop new strategies and adapt its websites to keep up with the digital landscape and stay relevant.
Hutong school defined four main aspects to focus on: performance improvement, upgrades and new features, bug fixing, and content update.
1. Performance Improvement
In order to enhance the performance of the websites and being able to sustain a large demand for access from users around the world, the servers of all 4 websites were upgraded to ensure they can handle a large number of visitors and registration data every day, and the performance for both Chinese and international audiences was optimized. Furthermore, a CDN was set up, allowing users around the world to have much faster access to content navigation.
2. Upgrades and New Features
Many new features were integrated and upgraded, attempting to bring about a better customer experience. In particular, the back office was reorganized to be better structured and facilitate websites management, while SSL was implemented for Hutong school, CRM site, and blog site, ensuring that all data remain encrypted when being transmitted between the web server and browser.
Furthermore, we improved the CRM system by tracking CRM Accounts, applying form field creation, and adding the redirect. CRM Account type “Affiliate” was also added to help Hutong school restructure their partners.
3. Bug Fixing
To make a website perform smoothly, eliminating all bugs is crucial. A thorough bug fixing process was designed and carried out under many aspects. For SEO purposes, Rel Canonical was used to fix any duplication errors, such as meta description, page content, page title. In addition, missing headings, meta description, and meta keywords were added, ensuring that there were no bugs blocking SEO performance. Furthermore, PHP and Javascript errors were fixed, ensuring custom URL function works accurately.
4. Content Update
Updating the content and design with the purpose of facilitating SEO process is also fundamental for a website in the expansion. To do so, more languages were added, and a connection with GoAbroad and GoOverseas was established to give users a preference to evaluate the quality of Hutong school. Furthermore, page translation issues were taken care of, ensuring that the page performs properly in multi-language version, with highlighted keywords for SEO in all languages.
The Result
Thanks to this thorough maintenance work, things have greatly improved at Hutong School: first of all, controlling the 4 websites has never been this easy. In particular, Internasia has received a complete revamp, and it is now much nicer and more streamlined to use.
Hutong School, on the other hand, has had a huge boost in popularity. The website ranks higher than ever on Google, which in turn led to more applications. Furthermore, adding and removing content on the website is incredibly seamless thanks to the revamped management system. At the moment, ITC team still continues fixing every last bug, ensuring to deliver flawless and responsive websites for Hutong.
Ida Speyer, Marketing Director and General Manager of Hutong School, shared her thought on our service:
Before working with ITC, website management and development was a costly, time consuming and overall frustrating affair. Once we starting working together with ITC this all changed and we are now able to work smoothly across our four websites with constant maintenance and updates from ITC that help us continue to improve our business performance. The team goes above and beyond to support us and always deliver outstanding results! ITC has helped us with every aspect of our website maintenance and development, from bug fixing to design to integration of systems to giving advice on UX and we have been happy with each and every project.