RMIT University Vietnam is the Vietnamese branch of the Australian research university, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, with campuses in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Danang. The Master of Global Trade is a new postgraduate degree developed by RMIT in partnership with the Hinrich Foundation and a wide range of industry partners. Aimed at mid-career professionals in Vietnam and across the region, the program prepares future leaders in trade-related industries. RMIT approached us for a higher education website design that would break away from the rigid, text-heavy format typical of academic websites. Until then, no individual program at RMIT Vietnam had its own dedicated website. Their marketing team was limited to a basic internal page with restricted structure, making it hard to communicate the program’s value or inspire potential applicants balancing full-time jobs. Our goal was to build a storytelling-driven site that could reflect the ambition and relevance of the program while supporting recruitment efforts.
Content Strategy for Higher Education Website Design
We kickstarted the project with a content strategy workshop, a crucial step in a higher education website design project, to identify and analyze the user personas, messaging and user journeys with RMIT marketing team. From the findings we came up with the main story concept and site structure. We also proposed the content templates and writing guidelines so that they could prepare the content accordingly.
Curriculum Page
To display content of all modules offered in the program without having to leave the page we chose to use accordion to list out all the modules. For more details we let the content opened in lightbox but still maintained individual URLs for Google to index.
Typography
To make long content more appealing to readers, we applied best practices in higher education website design by carefully designing and coding typography guidelines—such as headings, ordered lists, and tables—to ensure that long-form pages are well-structured, visually consistent, and easy to read.
THE OUTCOME
- A stunning, SEO-friendly website that was completed on time, on budget and was a helpful tool for the marketing team during their recruitment campaigns.
- As the first open-source, independently hosted website that had ever been allowed by the school, our site had to pass a compliance audit checklist with the strictest security protocols and meet the highest quality of coding.
