The Client and Their Brief
Digital Horizons is a non-profit initiative designed to help young people find creative and digital job opportunities in Dorset. They came to us looking for a team that could build a new WordPress site based on their designs. The site required a number of custom templates and filters, as well as multiple unique features. These included a bespoke job engine, the ability to find and display appropriate Eventbrite data on their calendar, and a web game to help students identify their potential future career paths. Once the site was complete, they also requested training to ensure their team could make the most of the site.
What We Did
We built the WordPress site using a custom theme and created custom post types with filters to handle the jobs and profiles pages. We installed the Events Calendar plugin to handle the functionality for events and ticket sales and used the Gravity Forms plugin to handle the main enquiry form.
Custom Job Engine
The purpose of the Job Engine was to suggest job roles suitable for the user based on their personality and interests. To determine this, we constructed a form containing a series of questions and answers based on the Myers Briggs test. The submitted form data was fed into our bespoke algorithm to return a list of suitable careers. For this to work, the job engine utilised data from Bournemouth University’s Creative Skills Escalator to fetch a list of job roles. Each job role included weightings corresponding to the preference pairs outlined in the Myers Briggs test: Perception or Judgement, Extraversion or Introversion, Sensing or Intuition and Thinking or Feeling. The algorithm compared the user’s answers with these weightings to identify the best-fit careers, effectively offering a range of career options for each user.
Interactive Quiz
As the quiz was based towards a younger audience, we created an additional version that was playable via a web game. The game included all of the form fields available in the quiz but presented them in a more engaging way through the use of the Digital Horizons mascot. The mascot introduced the user to the game, asked them questions and was integrated into a number of skill based mini-games. The purpose of the mini-games were to provide a fun way to test the user’s perception, mathematics, language and leadership skills. To test the user’s perception, we implemented a simple spot the difference game. For mathematics, we implemented a simple maths quiz. For leadership we presented a series of scenarios which required the user to make decisions. For language, we required the user to fill in a series of blanks within a paragraph. All data collected by the game was then fed into the job engine for analysis to determine suitable careers.
Eventbrite Calendar
The final requirement for the site was to automatically input any relevant and local Eventbrite data into the website’s calendar. For this, we built a custom plugin which utilises the Eventbrite API. This locates any events which are both local to Bournemouth, and which are marked with the relevant keywords. This event data is then exported from Eventbrite, any duplicates are checked against the existing data, and all remaining events automatically imported into the Digital Horizons calendar. To avoid spam and abuse, and to ensure no irrelevant data gets through, these events are not put live until confirmed by a moderator. We also included an option within the plugin to allow users to run the data scrape as often as they like, should they require more frequent updating.
The Result
Digital Horizons now have a great online presence with most areas of the site automatically handled by the server. This has allowed their staff the time and freedom to attend local schools and events, and to better engage the local community. The website also provides an excellent tool for school and college students to better identify potential careers in the digital and creative sectors, all provided in a manner that best engages them. The automatic calendar imports also mean that the site is regularly updated with relevant events content, which is fantastic for providing useful extra content to users, and for the site’s SEO!
How It Looks
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<p>Get In Touch</p>
<p>Thank you for your interest in our business. If you have any questions about our services, a project you’d like us to help with, or if you just want to say hello, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you!</p>
