• Accessibility
  • Continuous services
  • Illustration
  • Integration
  • UI/UX design
  • Visual design
  • Websites and web services

Lapland University of Applied Sciences’ digital service

Lapland University of Applied Sciences is a university of 6,000 students, offering 34 degree programmes leading to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The university’s campuses are located in Kemi, Rovaniemi, and Tornio, as well as a virtual campus online.

The renewal of Lapland University of Applied Sciences’ digital service is part of the broader renewal of the Lapland higher education community’s online services. The project was based on a requirements specification prepared jointly by the university and North Patrol, from which the overall concept for Lapland UAS was further developed and defined in spring 2024. The platform for Lapland UAS’s website is WordPress, implemented as a multisite. In the future, other services of the group will also be implemented within the same installation.

Explore Lapland University of Applied Sciences’ digital service

lapinamk.fi

The specification was refined in workshops

The concept design of the digital service was launched with joint workshops. In the first workshop, we focused on the service’s target groups and the objectives of the website renewal. During the requirements specification, the Lapland higher education community had already carried out extensive concept work, so the goals of the concept were clarified for the entire project team. In the visual identity workshop, we compared the digital services of other universities and defined the visual direction for the service. The new website was intended to be clear, representative of the North, high-quality and relaxed, yet content-oriented. The color scheme was refreshed from the previous one, but Lapland UAS’s familiar colors of red and turquoise remain.

In the technical workshop, we defined in more detail the content types and their taxonomies, user permission groups, external content to be brought into the service, and integrations. The overall scope was extensive, and regarding integrations, we held several meetings with the client and third-party vendors.

Technical implementations

Integrations and migration

The Lapland University of Applied Sciences’ digital service was implemented with Entra ID login, contact information integration, and various content embeds. For example, open positions are fetched from TalentAdore via RSS into a dedicated content block. In addition, the client can embed non-degree training courses from Kohamo using an iFrame. As an additional task, it was decided to renew the presentation of projects and their filtering functions, which had not worked accessibly on the old site. We built an integration with Rerportronic to fetch projects into a dedicated content type on the site and implemented customized filters for them. The project pages themselves were also redesigned to be clear and consistent.

The university’s previous site had already been in use for a long time, and it was decided to migrate news and blog articles to the new site. The migration was carried out from the Infoweb system to WordPress, with a supplementary migration run before the site’s launch. During the renewal, e-books published by the university were also transferred from their separate WordPress site to the lapinamk.fi site, with content migrated from WordPress to the new service. As an additional task, URN generation was implemented for e-books and Pohjoisen tekijät blog posts, giving articles and various writings permanent identifiers. A URN is an identifier that uniquely identifies a work – it corresponds to an ISBN for books online.

The service also pushes out bulletins to other systems. Using an RSS feed, student announcements and crisis communications are delivered to the Tuudo system, which is widely used by university of applied sciences students.

End result

The new Lapland University of Applied Sciences digital service was launched in autumn 2024. The service has received positive feedback and has brought a much-needed refresh to the university’s image. The digital service meets A/AA accessibility standards.

From the university’s theme, a separate theme was developed for the client’s use in creating additional sites within the multisite, enabling new sites to be built under the same installation. After the launch of the university of applied sciences’ site, we also began designing and implementing the University of Lapland’s digital service. The university’s site also makes use of the UAS theme, although with extensive customizations, and the look and feel naturally reflect the university’s own identity. The University of Lapland’s digital service will be launched in autumn 2025.

Explore digital service

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Contact us

Heidi Nora-Klemetti

Account Director, Partner

Phone: +358 40 575 2448