One platform, multiple brands

The student accommodation platform challenge

Global Student Accommodation (GSA) own a number of student accommodation brands, across multiple countries, and needed to have an engaging website presence to increase bookings across all brands, managed by a centralised team.

Their challenges included;

• Multiple brand identities, each brand needs ability to adopt platform 
• Disparate content editors across multiple countries
• Organic SEO very important in hyper-competitive market
• Each region requires different content, offers, imagery etc
• Multiple languages requirement for future-proofing
   

Understanding student accommodation brands

Being fully immersed in GSA’s brands; Student Housing Company and Uninest was imperative to the success of this project. We used our fast paced Immersion Phase Process and undertook a series of workshops to ensure that we are immersed in the brand, their vision and business goals, enabling us to identify where we can add the most value.

Research activities

• On campus surveys
• Hotjar polls to gather quantitative data about current site likes, dislikes
• Qualitative long form data on requirements, behaviour, etc

Experience design activities

• Prioritise users
• Prioritise user needs
• Build initial user flows
• Content mapping 
• Discuss look & feel
• Vision board

Technical activities

• Functionality review
• Config overview
• Technical spikes planning
• Integration requirements

Student platform technical approach 

A Drupal multi-site approach was chosen as we could retain the same functionality across the individual brands (search, booking, data capture etc.) while keeping separate URLS, front-end design, config and files and user profiles for the administration by the differing brand teams.

Key benefits of our multi-site Drupal approach;

• A single codebase, making core updates and introduction of new functionality quicker across the websites (and any future) websites
• Multiple databases, meaning that site structure, configuration, content and users can be configured per site
• Content can be shared across multisite instances using API’s
• Cascading themes make it simple create sites using the same base theme and then override relevant styles as appropriate
• Reuse of hosting infrastructure leads to a reduction hosting costs if sites hosted separately, or an improvement in performance over multiple separate sites hosted on a single server
• Lower total lifetime cost to maintain one codebase