Founded by Pauline Quirke, PQA is a national chain of performing arts Academies, with almost 200 academies across the UK and Europe.

With continued expansion across the UK, PQA approached Make because it wanted to revolutionise its web presence by putting the user at the forefront and increasing enrolment levels.

The brief

Make was asked to completely overhaul the existing UI and integrate new features that would enhance user-experience, increase user interaction and member enrolment.

Development and API integrations included:

Our approach

We worked closely with PQA’s technical and marketing teams throughout the project, discussing UX, UI and creative, which fuelled greater team collaboration and ideas generation. This later formed the functionality specification, UX and technical requirement that would turn these ideas to development.

During the process, our team performed a full ‘data-dive’ into Google Analytics, which enabled us to understand historic user behaviour and make informed UX decisions. We also spoke with key business stakeholders to understand their vision and goals for the process.

The challenge

With any large build involving multiple stakeholders, we faced the challenge of making sure the vision was aligned, timelines were agreed, project plan was on track and day-to-day communication was precise.

Technical integrations can also be complex and version control is therefore paramount. We worked across two staging environments and made sure well-commented versions (Github) were in place throughout the process, meaning everybody working on the website could easily follow and take control of the project at any one time.

The technical bit

By following our forever-evolving agency workflow, we made sure the project flowed through development with minimum bugs. We used:

Results

Our creative and digital teams worked closely with PQA to create an easy-to-use back end management system that puts the internal marketing teams in full control, something that is vital with an ever-growing website of this nature.

Our client said:

"The development of a new PQA website required a complete rebuild of 10 years of work and a complex search and booking function.

Make rose to the challenge by delivering an industry leading platform, one that is robust and optimised in generating the maximum possible conversions. Since going live 4 weeks ago, the site has already doubled our organic traffic and enrolled countless new students to our performing arts Academies across the UK."

Mark Milligan
Digital Marketing Manager - PQA

Talk to the team about your project.

Looking for help with a website or brand? Our helpful team will give you a free consultation and provide the best way forward for your exciting new project. Just fill out the form or call us now.






    Google logo

    We've worked with Make to redesign our public and media website. The team have been great to work with, accommodating last minute requests and having a thorough design process. I would highly recommend Make for any website needs.

    Virgin Racing

    Mollie’s have been working in partnership with Make Agency for the past 18 months, and in that time have been responsible for all elements of our digital marketing including web, social, creative and paid advertising.

    Soho House

    I worked with Make Agency as part of a new marketing strategy and re-brand for a Cloud Services Client. All the team were incredibly professional and easy to work with throughout the website build. Their knowledge of other areas including social ads, video and streaming was also impressive. Would highly recommend and work with the team again.

    IBM

    I would wholeheartedly recommend Make Agency. They worked tirelessly, to a strict budget and timescale to produce a fantastic website. They made the process slick and easy. Their creative ideas were great and responses to requests were instant! They are a great bunch of talented and lovely individuals who were / are a pleasure to work with!