New website for the Higher Economics School

About the client

The geography of HES corporate projects includes 75 cities across Russia.
The School's portfolio includes 1000 completed corporate projects of various formats: from classic courses, seminars and trainings to business simulations, facilitation and coaching.

Where did we start?

Anton Khodyka
Client, liaison, HES marketing and development director, business coach
Since 2014, we have provided technical support for the previous version of the site. We managed to develop a new design for the pages of the catalogue of modular programs. We made mockups of newsletters for the HES mailing list. We also set up the collection of statistics and checked the change in conversion.

Based on these data, the client decided to completely update the website design and its admin panel. In addition, the previous version was created in 2004 – since then, the requirements for both design and usability have changed. Therefore, we had to create a modern website that logically and clearly links together a huge amount of accumulated information.

What tasks did we have?

Attract new clients and increase the number of course applications
Create a modern design that matches the business class standard in education
Make a website for clients who are ready to read and think

Emphasis on choosing the teacher

Golomshtok Yulia Borisovna
co-founder and director of the Higher Economics School, coach, psychologist, teacher, consultant in the field of psychology and management. Has experience in individual counselling since 2005. Over 15 years of successful management experience.
ASK A QUESTION
It is very important for clients to understand who exactly will be teaching them. Therefore, we rethought the role of the teacher's page and gave it a higher significance. We made it as detailed as possible for each teacher so that the future student could get acquainted with the experience, education, career of the coach, projects and study programs in which they participate. Also, right on the page, we have added an option to ask the teacher a question – this makes the HES policy open and friendly.

Course landing page template

Before signing up for a training course, clients carefully think over and weigh everything, therefore the description of the courses must be complete, and their value must be reasoned.

For each course, we created a landing page, where we spoke in detail about the programs and their features. All landing pages were built according to a single template: who is this course for, description, program, teachers, learning outcomes – only necessary information. For clarity of information, we used large photos and videos of the learning process, as well as a slider with alumni reviews. This approach helps users quickly familiarise themselves with courses and choose the one that suits them.


HES describes their course programs in detail, and in order to preserve valuable content in a form convenient for the client, we added blocks describing the modules and their components
Антон
«Сделайте нам шаблон лендинга, чтобы для каждого курса подходил»
We have added three application forms for the course at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of each landing page so that clients who have already decided to study don't have to scroll through the entire page.

Master of Business Administration

The flagship of the HES study programs is the MBA course. Only top managers who have passed the entrance selection and are ready to devote 2 years to intensive training are allowed to study on this course

This is a deep, serious and expensive program, therefore the page must be visually and conceptually consistent with it and contain a lot of details. At the same time, the presentation of information should be structured so that the text would be interesting to read for every future student.
Well-placed accents guide the user throughout the page so that the main idea was easy to understand.
The MBA course is not only a list of educational materials and new knowledge that can be immediately applied in practice. The main advantage of the MBA at the Higher Economics School is its teachers. Experienced, highly educated, intelligent and open to dialogue. That is why we added a block with large photos and quotes of future teachers to the landing page, each of whom the user can ask a question via the feedback form. Even this correspondence acquaintance will help to make a decision in favour of the MBA at HES.
We also put in the separate block information about the international module, which took place in Germany at the DMAN business school. On the territory of a real castle

Case studies, projects, reviews

There are no two identical companies, as well as there are no identical projects. Therefore, HES is actively sharing their corporate training case studies. There is a title and a short description on the page, by clicking on the link you can read a detailed story with a clear structure, results and clients' feedback. The site visitor understands: HES specialists can solve problems of all sizes in various fields, from IT to metallurgy.
Having studied the reviews of the School's alumni, the user can send an enquiry for an individual program. The application form doesn't contain unnecessary fields and doesn't force clients to waste a lot of time filling it out while allowing HES employees to collect the necessary information about the organisation and immediately offer suitable training options.

Design
and positioning

“Don’t forget that we work for business people
We worked on highlighting accents to achieve the right effect: an important thought is immediately noticed by the user, but does not visually “scream”. This is the only way the site will meet the business-class education level.
Higher Economics School
business education for development and life
Modular business education programs
MBA program
Corporate training
Facilitation
We worked on highlighting accents to achieve the right effect: an important thought is immediately noticed by the user, but does not visually “scream”. This is the only way the site will meet the business-class education level.

Programming and layout

For the HES website, we used a modern technological base:
React
Python на Django
Wagtail
We had to refine and customise the capabilities of Wagtail CMS to meet all the requirements. Each page should be filled with a lot of related information, cross-sectional data about courses and the teachers who teach them.

Mobile version

According to statistics, 40-50% of visitors come to the website from mobile devices, therefore we immediately made it adaptive. For those pages where it was impossible to make adaptive design automatically, we drew separate layouts for the mobile version.

Каков результат?

Сложную схему учебных программ мы разбили по темам, отраслям и категориям, а меню стало горизонтальным. Добраться до нужного раздела сайта можно в один клик.

The
Team

Elena Dvoryashina
designer
Elena Tropina
designer
Maxim Smirnov
art director
Alexander Borodulin
front-end developer
Vladimir Sazhin
back-end developer
Anton Berezin
front-end developer
Vitaly Semyachkin
development team lead
Alexander Zhiryakov
project manager
Zhanna Lakhina
case study designer
Елена Дворяшина
дизайнер
Виталий Семячкин
тимлид разработки
Елена Тропина
дизайнер
Владимир Сажин
бэкенд-программист
Максим Смирнов
арт-директор
Антон Березин
фронтенд-программист
Александр Жиряков
менеджер проекта
Александр Бородулин
фронтенд-программист
Жанна Лахина
дизайнер кейса
Let’s talk