Host students

Website: host-students.com

Host students is a website built to get students to book accommodation through their RealPage portal. I originally built the whole site, but due to a change in management on the host side, a rebrand was requested before that work went live. Summarily I worked mostly on the backend of the site, organisation and planning of website structure, and the Launchpad framework which this project was built on, and a freelancer was brought in to work on the front end due to scheduling conflicts.

Locations and buildings

One of the major parts of this project was organising multiple locations and buildings in an easy to manage interface. I decided the best way to add this information was as two separate post types which were then linked via a bi-directional relationship ACF field. This allowed us to have our buildings (which have a lot of information in them) to have their own dedicated page, rather than using a repeater.

Each building has its own terms and conditions page, which we added as child pages of the buildings. To organise the admin in a cleaner way, we modified the admin side to show child pages in a column instead of taking up space in the main posts archive.

The Host hub

Another change being made in the rebuild was a re-organisation of their news posts. Originally they just had a simple news archive, but the new site needed to separate these posts out into 4 categories; news, new students info, parents info and university students info.

I used categories to separate out and organise these posts, along with category archives to separate them out on their own pages, but also created a singlular hub with filters to show all posts at once. When using the filters, it updates the query in the address bar, which makes it easier for users to share a link to a specific filtered set of posts.

Accessibility

The elephant in the room for this site is the Userway accessibility plugin. In discussions with the client, they expressed that they wanted to use the plugin for marketing purposes. I told them on the call that these accessibility wrappers are proven to negatively impact the accessibility of a website and passed on multiple resources to try and influence their opinion (including the Overlay Fact Sheet) but unfortunately this didn’t change their mind. The original build did not need this plugin as it was thoroughly audited to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards.