Catholic University of Freiburg

Website relaunch for the largest university of applied sciences for social and health sciences in Baden-Württemberg.

Information architecture
UX Design
Web design
Pimcore development
Full-text search
Multilingualism DE/EN
GDPR forms
Accessibility
Job Board

Since 1971, the Catholic University of Applied Sciences in Freiburg has been training specialists and managers for professions of social relevance. Its sponsoring bodies include the Archdiocese of Freiburg, the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart and the German Caritas Association.

The previous website did not meet today’s requirements, either technically or in terms of design. Information on degree programmes, continuing professional development, application procedures, entry requirements, fees, staff and job vacancies was available – but not easily accessible.

The result is a modern, accessible website built on Pimcore: featuring a clear information architecture, a powerful full-text search function and an editorial environment where content is maintained once and displayed correctly everywhere.

Our work:

Analysis of the existing website and user journey
Design of the new information architecture
Design and development of front-end components
Implementation in Pimcore with custom content models
Full-text search across all content types
Automatically generated contact pages
Approval process for job advertisements, including automatic deactivation
GDPR-compliant, encrypted storage of form data
Newsletter integration and consent-based media integration
Quality assurance, testing and go-live

Lots of content, just a few clicks

A university website is not a product catalogue. It serves prospective students, current students, researchers, job applicants and staff all at the same time – each group arrives with a different question and expects to find the answer on the same homepage.

That was precisely the challenge: organising a university’s vast amount of information in such a way that navigation remains straightforward.

Centrally manage multilingual content and ensure it is displayed consistently
Intelligently linking degree programmes, entry requirements and fees
Storing form data in encrypted form and being able to delete it completely on request
Automatically generate contact pages from centrally maintained data
Publish job vacancies from external sources and automatically deactivate them once they have expired
Maintain intuitive navigation despite the large volume of information

In Pimcore, degree programmes are standalone content models – not pages. Qualification, start date, standard duration of study, entry requirements, costs and contact persons are available as structured fields.

The system uses this information to generate the overview, the quick info, the details page and the search results. A new degree programme is a single data record – not six pages that can become disorganised.

Structured content models

for degree programmes, further education courses and individuals

Multilingualism

German and English from a single data source

Automatic pages

Contacts and positions are generated from centralised data

Each tile shows exactly what it is supposed to show.

The overview groups degree programmes by qualification and start date. ‘Quick info’ opens the key details directly within the tile, whilst ‘Details’ takes you to the full page.

The quick info section includes the qualification, start date, standard duration of study, ECTS, study model, entry requirements, languages and costs – the same fields that also populate the details page and the search results. If the tuition fee changes, it is updated in one place.

This makes it possible to decide early on whether a degree programme is a good fit – without prospective students having to open each details page individually and then navigate back.

As the main workload – structure and data maintenance – lies with the university rather than with the development team, the website remains scalable without every change requiring a support ticket to be raised with the agency.

New continuing professional development courses, new staff members, new job vacancies: the editorial team prepares the content, and the system publishes it. The platform runs on a container-based architecture and is therefore ready for future expansion.