Gruppo Editoriale La Scuola is a historic Italian publishing group that offers a rich catalogue of didactic texts for every school grade. With La Scuola Academy it offers training courses dedicated both to teachers and to school institutes - in compliance with the M.I. National Training Plan -; the group is also the publisher of three sector magazines (Scuola Italiana Moderna, Scuola e Didattica, Nuova Secondaria). Founded in 1904 and 1908 respectively, Editrice La Scuola and SEI, Società Editrice Internazionale, have a long tradition of quality and innovation in the field of school publishing, to which Edizioni Il Capitello was added in May 2022. The Gruppo Editoriale La Scuola also includes other publishing houses such as Il Capitello, Cappelli and Hachette.
Redesign of the group’s digital identity and design of a new portal in a modern, high-performance and scalable key, based on Drupal and Angular, to exploit the potential of native cloud solutions and enhance the constant production of the group’s editorial content for different targets such as teachers, lecturers, the teaching world, as well as students and families.
The La Scuola Publishing Group needed to renew its portal, building a new digital identity and making it more modern, high-performance and scalable, capable of managing a large catalogue of works, courses, and magazines for schools and vocational training, as well as a large amount of digital content to support teaching and articles produced by the editorial staff. The portal was to provide the functionality of an e-commerce platform, where users could purchase training courses and magazine subscriptions easily and securely. Last but not least, the group’s new digital presence had to continue to provide access to all digital content ancillary to textbooks for both students and teachers, managing integrated profiling with cross-services to various Italian publishers, such as Zaino Digitale.
The client then expressed the need to have advanced user profiling functionalities, based on customised surveys, which would allow them to propose dedicated offers and customised brochures based on the needs and interests of teachers and students. From the initial analyses, it was also necessary to allow the activation of digital books and the creation of personal areas for teachers, students and agents, access to reserved content, manage their adoptions and contact customer service. Lastly, the site had to enhance the editorial content of La Scuola, presenting its novelties, magazines, articles and the thematic section La Scuola digitale, which offers supplementary and innovative digital content for distance and in-presence teaching.
To realise this ambitious project, La Scuola chose SparkFabrik as its partner for the definition of its new digital identity, design and technological implementation, relying on our experience and expertise in strategy, UX/UI, web development and native cloud solutions. We accepted the challenge with enthusiasm and professionalism, proposing a solution in line with the brand’s characteristics, innovative and tailored to the client’s needs.
We created a new digital presence for La Scuola, which would highlight the editorial works and content, while maintaining the basic characters and brand heritage in the layout. The foundations of the design and UX strategy were aimed at a mobile fruition in primis, guaranteeing freshness, readability and functionality.
The design activities, constantly supported by prototyping and constant comparison with the client’s team, were coordinated and merged with the technological implementation to guarantee a modern, high-performance and scalable portal. Based on Drupal and Angular, the solution made it possible to exploit the potential of the native cloud solutions and enhance the client’s editorial content, seeking to provide the editorial staff with an editing tool with great margins for flexibility in layout and content.
The portal was built with a headless architecture, with a Drupal backend managing the content and an Angular frontend presenting it to users. This choice allowed us to have greater speed in development and deployment, and to guarantee high interface performance, thanks to the separation of logic and presentation.
Subsequently, we developed the portal using open source technologies such as Drupal and Angular, which offer complete flexibility and customisation for the client and its editorial staff, and top performance for the user navigation experience and SEO, with the aim of integrating the platform with the most advanced native cloud solutions to guarantee scalability, security and reliability of the service.
The portal offers users a smooth and pleasant navigation, thanks to the responsive frontend realised with Angular, an open source framework created by Google that offers speed and optimisation. It was then integrated with third-party platforms and tools required by the client’s digital ecosystem, some already present and others to be introduced in the future, such as online payment systems, distance learning platforms, and more. The automation of the most modern native cloud part went as far as the modernisation of the client’s legacy part, allowing the client not to change its workflow while benefiting from all the innovations, such as the automatic import of catalogue content with all related digital assets from a simple .zip file uploaded by the client to its servers.
To realise this project, we fielded a multidisciplinary team, consisting of strategists, UX experts, head of design, UI designers, developers and devops, who worked in a collaborative and agile manner. We used Agile methodologies to manage the project in a flexible and iterative manner, involving the client in every step of the process. We used CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) processes to automate development, testing and code release, ensuring quality and speed.
The result of our work is a portal that fully meets the requirements of the La Scuola publishing group, both in terms of image, loook&feel, usabiility and content, as well as technology. The CMS offers simple and autonomous content management, and allows the customer to update the catalogue and news quickly and completely independently.
The e-commerce platform is secure and reliable, and allows users to purchase products quickly and easily.
Finally, the advanced user profiling functions, the activation of the digital contents of the printed works, the creation of personal areas, the integration with third-party platforms and tools, and the thematic sections dedicated to the Digital School, which proposes innovative and integrative digital contents for distance and in-presence teaching, have enabled the La Scuola Publishing Group to offer its users a customised, complete and quality service, in line with the needs and trends of the school and training world.
The new website www.lascuolasei.it has recorded a significant increase in visits, conversions and sales, as well as greater user loyalty, and has helped strengthen the image and reputation of Gruppo Editoriale La Scuola as a leader in the school and training sector.
