About the client
Edu Africa offers safe, expertly-planned educational programmes and projects in a broad range of interest areas, across 13 countries in Southern and East Africa. These take the form of Faculty-Led, School, Study Abroad and Service Learning programmes.
As a pioneer in educational travel on the continent, Edu Africa provides a depth of experience and a well-established network of partners, affiliates and academic minds that few other companies can match.
Their programmes and projects are inspired by first-hand experiences of living, travelling and working in Africa – but these evolve continuously to include new learning opportunities that are meaningful in the African context. The fact that Edu Africa has so many returning guests pays testament to the exceptional quality and ongoing relevance of the experiences that they offer.
Business challenge
Edu Africa reached a stage in their business journey where they wanted to cement their brand identity as an organisation that provides unique learning and educational travel opportunities in Africa. The look, feel and language of their existing website was not reflecting their core business offering clearly enough – and they wanted to change this.
As a company that is passionate about people, education and changing lives one experience at a time, Edu Africa wanted to partner with a digital agency that understands the nuances of their brand and company ethos. They chose to collaborate with Kri8it on this project, due to our long history of working with travel organisations and our broad range of digital marketing skills.
The solution
Before we started with any design work, our UX specialists refined the Edu Africa website information architecture to create a more streamlined and intuitive user experience. We then created a wireframe displaying the various content areas and access points, to be sure that Edu Africa was happy with the flow of content and the navigation strategy before design began.
The concept we have rolled out is different to the usual layouts you see online. It utilises a 30/70 screen split that allows the user to navigate to a new page quickly and easily, without having to scroll to the top or pull up the main menu. This creates a much smoother and more convenient experience for the user.
In terms of the design look and feel, we reworked the imagery to conform to a unique style that’s consistent across all platforms. We also designed new icons, buttons and other site elements to modernise the brand identity.
Development
The final, approved design was a complex one to work with from a website development point of view, especially with a navigation element that is fixed on the left and dynamic, scrollable content sitting on the right. This type of approach does not always translate well into the mobile user experience.
To address these challenges and optimise time to market, Kri8it’s development team built this website using the agile WordPress platform. Taking a modular approach to each template made it simpler to manage the unique design elements. This also made it easier for our client to add new content sections to the site as and when needed. When content is added, the code does a lot of the hard work behind the scenes, without affecting the simplicity of the user interface.
The final website is fully responsive without losing any of the design elements that our client loved for the mobile versions.
Content
Kri8it was asked to develop a new ‘voice’ for this brand – one that differentiates Edu Africa Africa from leisure tourism brands, as well as other operators in the educational travel space. The experiences that Edu Africa provides are unique, authentic and rooted in Africa – providing academics, students and scholars alike with opportunities to learn beyond the classroom or lecture hall, while enjoying a life-changing journey.
We took our time to create a new brand tone and style that expresses this clearly, yet also engages a very diverse audience – from those interested in service learning to those keen to advance their academic careers. Ultimately, we produced a large amount of content for this website, which provides information on all the programmes and projects on offer, the destinations, the educators and academic facilities involved and much more.
Our designers and developers found a smart way to house all this content in one website without impacting the seamless, intuitive user-experience.
The result
“ We absolutely loved working with the Kri8it team! From our very first meeting, their friendliness and passion for what they do was evident. They weren’t at all scared of our tight deadline and tackled our website refresh with the utmost professionalism and creativity. The ability they showed to accurately execute the vision that we had for this project was phenomenal. I was impressed by their clear communication and the overall way that they managed the project.”
Charl Ackermann
Marketing Manager, Edu Africa
