British Council
Like a number of charities and public sector organisations today, the value of digital is becoming more apparent for the British Council and, with budgets increasingly tightened, a bigger emphasis is being placed on obtaining growth through this channel.
Digital is becoming one of the primary delivery channels for the British Council and a digital programme has been set up to transform the organisation and its engagement with partners and customers over the next three years.
The decision was made to completely redevelop the entire British Council web infrastructure, incorporating the following:
- Corporate homepage and landing pages
- 110 country websites
- 150 project websites
- Various small/micro sites
The scale of the project is reflected in the following levels of user traffic:
- 15m unique visits per quarter
- 100m page views per quarter
- 30% year on year growth for the lifetime of the solution
Ixis has worked with the British Council for over 5 years building sites and supporting and hosting their collection of teaching and learning websites that now generate over 30 million page impressions per month. In August 2011, Ixis was selected to carry out work on the overall British Council web project after partnering with business and technology service company, Logica. Ixis also teamed up with high availability Linux specialist Bashton to ensure 24/7 coverage for the entire Linux infrastructure. Together, the companies are working to implement a content management system, as well as manage the hosting and support for the entire British Council web infrastructure.
Since the British Council corporate homepage was launched last month as part of the project, there has not been any downtime recorded which is a departure from the old website platform which the organisation claim they had received failure alerts ‘near daily’.
Peter Edwards, Digital Technology Manager said:
“Not only have we seen 100% uptime from the new platform but it’s four times faster than the previous instance, which is so important for us. We’ve found Ixis’ professional monitoring has been very impressive at flagging security threats which is vital for us, especially when there are professional hackers targeting government and public sector sites every day.”
Phase two of the British Council web project began in July 2012 with the overall project due for completion in 2015.
