QAA Embraces Mobile with Sitefinity

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) safeguards the standards of the UK higher education system, conducting assessments of universities and colleges throughout the country. The QAA website plays a vital role in this process, enabling the independent organization to reach audiences both in the UK and internationally.

With innovation at its foundation, QAA wanted its website to keep up with the same quality standards it held for higher education. However, the organization’s CMS was a major obstacle—it was unresponsive and made building pages difficult, with no widgets and inflexible page templates.

With Progress® Sitefinity™ and help from Sitefinity partner Argo Ventures Digital, QAA was able to craft a website that not only delivered a more engaging user experience, but also improved accessibility and ease of use for visitors.

From the visitor perspective, the new Sitefinity-powered QAA website delivers an innovative, feature-rich digital experience. The Sitefinity platform enables QAA to embrace mobile devices with responsive design capabilities, which means visitors get a great experience regardless of whether they’re on a computer, tablet or smartphone.

From the management side, the multisite and multilingual features of Sitefinity were critical to improving ongoing development and maintenance. QAA has three websites (the main QAA site, a Scotland-focused site and an Enhancement Themes program site), all of which can now be managed easily from a single application.

Integration with third-party databases was another key win. The main QAA website taps into an external database to display information and reports about universities, colleges and other higher ed providers. Integrating this database with Sitefinity enables content items to be updated automatically, which reduces duplication of effort and increases data accuracy.

Digital experience has become a key competitive differentiator in today’s digital-first world. Sitefinity enables QAA to deliver an engaging digital experience for visitors while also providing the organization with the ability to quickly and effortlessly manage the experience based on the needs of its audience.

“Sitefinity came as invaluable help for QAA since we were able to address a lot of challenges with the CMS,” said Veronica Milcheva, CEO/Founder, Argo Ventures Digital. “The new presentation transformed the website from ‘same old, same old’ to ‘wow.’”

Since switching from SharePoint 2013 to Sitefinity, QAA has launched a major suite of new pages as well as extensive changes to top-level navigation in response to visitors’ usage patterns. With the support of Argo Ventures and an array of layouts and widgets available to content editors, the QAA site can easily be improved and iterated upon as needed.

The value of the new site is already evident. Since launch, approximately 22.8% of visitors are now accessing the site from mobile devices. With the responsive design element being a major goal of the overhaul project, being able to serve this audience was a major win for QAA.