New website build combing three sites into one for The BCNO Group
It’s been a busy few months working with The BCNO Group on their new website build. We often build larger sites, but combing three sites into one has been a big job for us and the team at BCNO.
A couple of years back, an existing client of ours, the European School of Osteopathy (ESO), merged with The British College of Osteopathic Medicine (BCOM) and built a simple website for the new combined colleges, The BCNO Group.
Having waited for the market to get used to the combined colleges, the team at BCNO wanted to revamp the combined website and start bringing in course information and other content from the ESO and BCOM websites with the eventual requirement to shut down the two independent websites. The problem, though, is without losing too many ranking positions on search engines on the existing sites while the new one goes live.
As ever, we were up to the challenge and our designer Diana got started on various page designs and layouts for the new site. We wanted to keep the separation between the two colleges as well as BCNO Group’s main combined content, so we opted to keep the colour schemes of ESO, a light blue, and BCOM’s dark green, so when prospective students are on BCOM content, they’ll see green headings, menus and links, whilst ESO pages will use the light blue and BCNO shared content a dark blue. It’s a very effective use of colour and helps visitors know what College information they are viewing.
With the designs ready, the build was started using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS). Both College’s existing websites were built on WordPress, so as the BCNO team are used to working with it, there was no reason to change it.
We use a front-end page builder tool called Beaver Builder to make editing the website pages easy, and as it’s a lightweight framework, along with our fast hosting servers, we can be sure of high page speed scores which Google now requires to aid ranking position. And as we provide website management for all the BCNO Group websites, including hosting, backups, security updates, content edits and design we’ll be keeping a close eye on the ranking and performance of the new site.
The build took several months due to the large amount of content being combined and numerous page layouts and designs. And with many departments across multiple locations reviewing the content and page designs it took some time. But we’re now seeing the rewards with a fast-loading, easy-to-navigate website that combines the two colleges while keeping them separate entities.
We’re already seeing significant improvements in page ranking for the new site, and in the coming months, the two old college websites will be closed down, but for now, redirects and messages to advise visitors to use the new site are helping push the new site to the forefront.
Take a look through the website here: https://bcnogroup.ac.uk/