Sequence, Wales' leading web development company, has completed its most ambitious project to date with the successful launch of a new website for Wales' top-rated academic institution, Cardiff University.

With more than 5,000 members of staff, 22,000 students and an annual turnover of £300 million, the recent merger of Cardiff University and the University of Wales College of Medicine has created Wales' largest university. The merger has also called for a comprehensive and dynamic new website.

In designing the new website, Sequence were charged with implementing a fresh new look and navigation that would aid Cardiff University's students, staff, industry partners and local community stakeholders in finding information. In addition, the website was required to help the University promote its mission to pursue research, learning and teaching of international distinction, for the benefit of Wales and the wider world.

"Our challenge was to design and build an incredibly large web site in a short amount of time that would be easy for many different content providers to use and offer long-term benefits to Cardiff University's students and employees as well as the local community," says Phil Murphy, Systems Development Director for Sequence.

In just four months, Sequence developed a site worthy of Cardiff University's stature and reputation. In doing so, Sequence worked closely with a number of different departments within the two merging universities to ensure a seamless transition of online content and a solid understanding of the needs of all parties involved.

The new site was developed with J2EE server technology that complemented the operational platform used to deliver the original site. Phil Murphy continues, "We worked with the University IS team to deliver our solution directly into their existing infrastructure. The platform of Solaris running Apache and Tomcat with clustered Oracle backend databases has proven to be a resilient, yet responsive production environment".

Highlights include:

• A new multi-channel homepage that allows different stakeholders (students, staff, industry and community) to easily navigate the site based on their own needs.
• A content-management system built in just two months to accommodate the migration of thousands of existing pages and to ensure that those pages could now be maintained and updated in a simple uniform fashion requiring no technical expertise.
• A CMS offering hierarchical content publication user rights to manage content publication workflow.
• A bilingual site that facilitates the workflow of translation of content from English in to Welsh or vice versa.
• A CMS that automatically enables and enforces AA accessibility standards.

Today, the Cardiff University website handles 180,000 page requests per day. Over 50 content managers within many different schools and divisions use Sequence's CMS to post and maintain 5,000 difference web pages. Facilitating the timely needs of such a busy site, 99 percent of all requests sent to the CMS are handled by cache.

Martyn Kelly, Cardiff University Web Services Manager commented "Sequence have provided the new University with a first class online platform that forms an excellent foundation for the extensive communications and marketing activity planned for the coming months".

"We were delighted to be selected to deliver the new Cardiff University website," adds Sequence's Phil Murphy. "Having undertaken my own Computer Science degree at Cardiff it was a real privilege to use some of the knowledge that I gained whilst in attendance to help contribute to the future success of the University".