UKEAS required a complete overhaul of their website, which was previously built using hand-coded HTML, JavaScript, and PHP. OpenSense Labs leveraged Drupal 9 to transform their digital presence and support the rebranding to Intake Education. The project involved unifying multiple sites to better manage content and deliver a personalized experience for students from diverse countries. In September 2022, following the successful rebrand and platform revamp, Intake Education announced its acquisition by IDP Education.
About The Client
Founded in 1983 in Taiwan, UKEAS, now rebranded as Intake Education, is an education consultancy that caters to the needs of international students by offering counselling and application services for high schools, colleges and universities across the English-speaking world. With a strong presence in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as a base in the UK, Intake strives to provide impartial, professional and comprehensive advice to students and its partner institutions.
Client Feedback
https://clutch.co/go-to-review/c1b5b668-0562-4a2b-8c67-39450e36d075/11362
OSL’s experience and problem-solving skills in Drupal implementation requirements were impressive. Although the occasional requirements changed, they kept everything within the project timeline.
Project Highlights
- UKEAS was to be rebuilt with Drupal a easy but secure CMS.
- All 9 websites of Intake Education were unified under an umbrella to help students gain better access to educational opportunities.
- Multilingual functionality along with location intelligence were opted to make the same content digestible to different countries Intake served in.
- Intake’s partner institutions were prioritised with a dedicated site to serve their information needs.
Challenges and Objectives
- Unification of Intake’s All 9 Websites: Intake Education wanted to unify all its 9 websites for better support and maintenance. The main objective was to bring all student-serving sites under one roof, so that content syndication becomes easier along with being centrally available, hence bringing down the server and maintenance costs substantially.
- Elimination of Data Redundancy: With 9 fully functional sites, updating information on any one of them meant updating the same information again on the other 8 sites. So, the next challenge was to reduce data redundancy and improve efficiency.
- Rebranding UKEAS to Intake with Modernised FaceLift: The UKEAS website was quite outdated with hand-coded PHP, the goal was to employ a centralised CMS to rebrand UKEAS as Intake Education and give it a major Facelift. Drupal 9 and Twig were resorted to meet the client’s expectations of a new and fresh look that resonated with their vision. Atomic design approach was followed to keep design components reusable.
- Implementation of Multilingual Functionality: Since Intake wanted to use the same content for different countries, it needed to come with multilingual functionality to serve content in Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai amongst others.
- Development of a Partner Website: Intake wanted to prioritise its partner institutions. For the same, a separate website had to be developed that would serve informational needs specific to the client’s partners.
Drupal stood out as the best choice due to several key factors:
- Need of Powerful and Easy CMS
- Flexibility & Customization: Drupal provides a highly extensible and modular structure, allowing us to tailor features like role-based access, subscriptions, and pricing models to meet SaaS requirements.
- Security & Performance: Drupal’s robust security framework, granular access control, and built-in caching strategies (e.g., BigPipe, CDN integration) ensure that DrupalFit is secure, fast, and scalable.
- Community & Long-Term Support: Drupal is a mature, community-driven platform with long-term security updates and an active developer ecosystem, ensuring sustainability and continuous improvement.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
