Ranked No.1 in the UK for the quality of its research, University of Oxford has the largest volume of world leading research in the country.
The University of Oxford stands for research, innovation and being at the forefront of technical progress, so it is important that the university's content approach is reflective of this and uses the latest technologies.
The university wanted to position themselves as a global forum for intellectual engagement and therefore a significant change to the way News and Research was delivered was required.
Following a detailed discovery phase, using workshops to facilitate discussions and decision making between key teams and stakeholders, we decided to take a ‘Content as a Service’ approach which would help to maximise the potential and reach of the university’s groundbreaking research. The decision was made to move the existing news and research content to a headless, Kentico Kontent platform.
Built outside of the main Oxford University website and using a subdomain, the new News and Research website took into account both the need for a fresh, new design and UX approach and a new, simplified workflow for the university’s content team.
Kentico Kontent allows for central content management, offering scalability, flexibility and agility to push content to not only the main website but a number of other online channels, apps and social media. The university’s content team were particularly interested in using this approach to push data to news platforms, such as Flipboard and Apple News, and voice assistants for greater exposure.
Kentico Kontent offered the features we were looking for from a technical point of view, including taxonomy, roles, webhooks and responsive images. In addition to providing tools for the content team to streamline processes, including customisable workflows and collaboration. Having all content housed in a single location allowed for faster production and higher quality output.
The Content Management API also proved to be important for the project. This allowed us to help the client in migrating all their existing content over to Kentico Kontent from an existing Drupal CMS.
To keep up with other news sources, Accelerated Mobile Pages were also a key requirement, ensuring that web pages load faster on mobile, improving usability and encouraging visitors to stay longer on site.
