Evolving education websites reaching millions of users

Long-term evolution to get The Career Portal performing at its best

The Career Portal owns The Medic Portal and The Lawyer Portal — career-driven education platforms used by millions every year.

They wanted a technical partner they could trust to evolve their sites over the long-term.

What the client wanted

About The Medic Portal

The Medic Portal is the UK’s leading resource for Medicine applicants, in official partnership with the Royal Society of Medicine. Its application support has been trusted by 40,000+ students, and over 500 schools around the world.

Founded by Doctors in 2015, The Medic Portal is the authoritative preparation provider for the key Medicine aptitude tests: the University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT) and BioMedical Admissions Test (BMAT). It is also the go-to consultant for Medicine interview support.

About The Lawyer Portal

The Lawyer Portal helps aspiring lawyers achieve their ambitions. It is an award-winning platform, partnered with the UK’s three flagship professional bodies: the Law Society of England & Wales, the Bar Council and CILEX.

Working in collaboration with qualified lawyers and some of the UK’s leading law firms, The Lawyer Portal’s tailored content reaches millions of users every year.

Robust, secure sites with great infrastructure

A key goal was to ensure both sites met the gold standard from a technical perspective, with best-practice security implemented by us at every stage.

Doing this provides a foundation for continuous evolution and improvement in future.

We also advised upon – and fully-managed – a hosting migration, to ensure the sites would benefit from a solution matched to their specific needs.

Speed, performance and scalability at peak periods

A great deal of our focus went into improving site performance – including refactoring code to make the sites leaner and faster to load.

As part of our continued efforts to boost site speed, we run regular performance testing and audit areas of the sites to identify improvement opportunities.

These developments help to drive more search traffic to the sites, deliver a better user experience, and encourage higher conversion rates.

Compliant and optimised analytics setup

We advised on a setup that allows the client to understand site usage, while respecting user privacy and remaining compliant with GDPR requirements.

We have also collaborated on optimising the setup for the next phase of Google Analytics.

Audit and code review

We completed an audit to get a full picture of the sites and identify areas to improve. We then started systematically implementing these improvements.

Strengthening the online course experience

To enhance the online course experience on The Medic Portal, we researched options for a better Learning Management System (LMS). We settled on LearnDash.

We completed a design review, and made tweaks to bring the LMS design in line with the brand. We then implemented the new system and migrated existing online course users.

Refreshing the client’s online courses has created a more engaging and interactive learning experience that has been extremely well received.

Opening up opportunities through search

Search functionality is integral to user experience on The Medic Portal and The Lawyer Portal, and we have worked to ensure it matches user intent.

Improvements include auto-complete, highlighting search terms in results and categorising results. It is now easier for users to find exactly what they want.

Enhanced Functionality on The Lawyer Portal

We’ve collaborated with the client to redesign sections of The Lawyer Portal where law firms promote their apprenticeships, career options, and training opportunities.

We considered how these sections could become easier to navigate, review and absorb, while presenting the most important information in the most compelling way.