A website helping those inspired to study in New Zealand feel at home.
Overview
NauMai, based on the Māori phrase ‘nau mai’ of invitation and welcome, invites New Zealand bound international students to explore information and advice about their new home away from home. The website provides ample insights and information about not only education but exploring the country and staying happy and healthy along the way.
Client
Education New Zealand
Technologies/Services
Next.js
Contentful
Algolia
NauMai: A Comprehensive Guide for International Students in New Zealand
Designed to be a subdomain of the already existing Study with New Zealand (SWNZ) web platform, NauMai was dreamed up as an information hub, supplying information on everything from Visas to Kiwi lingo. The management team wanted the site to be a one-stop shop with information, support and links to additional expert resources. They also needed the website to be easy to use, aligned with the existing SWNZ website, and be adaptable to any future growth or change.
Leveraging a headless CMS for ease of us
Prior to Voyage coming onboard, the existing backend solution for the NauMai site was causing complications and unnecessary issues. The decision was made to move management of the site to a headless CMS, given the ENZ team were already using this option for content management.
Voyage was tasked with using existing SWNZ UI and Contentful CMS to ensure consistency across the suite of student sites and brand alignment. This presented some difficulty in migrating existing data and infrastructure, but promised extensive benefits including greater flexibility and streamlined website management.
Utilising a headless CMS was important not only for achieving the NauMai site requirements, but ensuring the flexibility, scalability and security of ENZ’s overall vision for its student portal development.
Aligning the site to the wider ENZ student portal ecosystem
The discovery phase of this project, and subsequent site upgrade, uncovered the fact that development and implementation of new components had to seamlessly integrate with the entire SWNZ ecosystem. This meant making sure the user experience was consistent across all platforms and apps. With this knowledge, Voyage set about building the website from the ground up so it would fit in well and speak to other SWNZ websites and apps.
Collaboration and Quality Assurance
The NauMai site is an excellent example of collaboration and quality assurance in action. The Voyage team worked closely with ENZ’s agency village - predominantly via the ENZ project manager and also directly with key team members at other agencies.
Extensive and thorough testing
The development pipeline included extensive quality assurance testing of every feature before client testing and final sign-off. On top of this, penetration testing was completed to ensure that no aspects of security or privacy breaches were overlooked throughout development. This part of the project was extremely important as the site works with user data.
Having a single codebase and consistent UI library
NauMai NZ not only fulfills the immediate requirements of ENZ but also serves as a robust foundation for future enhancements. By adopting a modular approach and implementing scalable features within a monorepo architecture, the platform can adapt to the evolving needs of international students.
The monorepo consolidates all components and modules in a single repository, enabling better code organisation, code reuse, and collaboration among developers. It streamlines testing and deployment processes and facilitates future enhancements and scalability.
The components developed for NauMai NZ can also be seamlessly integrated into SWNZ using a custom UI library, offering ENZ the opportunity to provide consistent user experiences across their entire digital ecosystem.
“Working on the NauMai NZ project allowed us to showcase our expertise in developing robust and scalable web applications. It was exciting to work with Education New Zealand and other agencies to create a platform that provides valuable resources and support to international students. The use of Next.js and Algolia helped us deliver a high-quality product that meets the needs of our client and their users.”
Keziah Rackley-Gale - Developer, Voyage
Delivering a high quality product that’s designed for now and the future
Voyage effectively delivered a high-quality product that provides valuable resources and support to international students in New Zealand. With its solid foundation and potential for future enhancements, NauMai NZ ensures that Education New Zealand remains at the forefront of international student support and engagement.
