What we're building, why, and what it will take. A companion to the technical spec Olaf is working from.
StudentBridge built a video library website for Suffolk University, with video delivered by imedia8's ContentHub. It works well: prospective students can browse videos, pick their interests and see a personalised feed, track a virtual campus tour, save favourites, and get to Apply, Visit or Request Info in one tap.
The catch is that everything about Suffolk is baked into the website itself. Their navy and gold appear 372 times in the code. The word "Suffolk" appears 86 times. The 22 videos, the FAQ answers, the key dates and the chat replies are all typed directly into the page. To launch the same experience for a second university, someone would have to copy the whole site and change every one of those by hand, then do it again for every update.
That doesn't scale past two or three clients. The platform fixes it. imedia8 will build, own and run the platform specifically for StudentBridge, who will use it under licence to launch and manage sites for their university clients.
Think of the website as a template and the client file as the content that fills it. Suffolk gets a Suffolk file. The next university gets their own. Both run on the same website code. When we improve the player or fix a bug, every client gets it at once.
Everything a client would want to be different. In order of how often it changes:
Plus a short list of on/off switches we control: whether a client has the StudentHUB panel, the chat assistant, the floating mini-player, and whether visitors can sign in.
We've already written Suffolk's client file by pulling their content out of the current site. It's the proof that the idea holds: nothing about Suffolk was left behind.
Very little, which is the point. A prospective student on the Suffolk site sees the same library they see today. The differences are improvements we're making while we're in there:
A login to the admin tool where their admissions team can add a video, change a deadline, update an FAQ answer or swap a photo, see a preview, and publish. No ticket to us, no developer. If a client allows sign-in, the same tool shows them who has been engaging and what they're interested in.
Steps 2 and 3 come before the admin tool deliberately. Building an editor for a file format we haven't tested on a second client would mean rebuilding it.
One template with swapped colours would make every client site recognisably the same. So the platform offers three templates, and each client picks one:
On top of the template, a client chooses a theme (dark, light or tinted with their colour), a card shape (widescreen, poster or square), their colours and fonts, and which sections appear. Three templates, three themes and three card shapes give 27 structurally different sites before colour and content come in. Two clients on the same template will still read as different sites.
Mock-ups of all three templates, each on a different demo brand, are in the design files.
Suffolk also has a Campus Discovery page: an illustrated map of downtown Boston with 14 pins. Tap a pin and you get that building's video, photos, a 360° view, opening hours and a description. A guided seven-stop tour draws a route across the map and tracks your progress, and a "Smart Path" builder makes a tour to fit the time you have.
The platform treats the map as a standard feature any client can switch on. It appears in all three templates (each in its own style) and as an optional preview block on the home page. In the admin tool, a client uploads their campus illustration, clicks to drop pins, fills in each location's details and media, drags the tour stops into order, and sets walking times. Suffolk's 14 locations are already in their client file.
Some clients will want more than templates, themes and colours allow. For them, the platform can export the design files for their site. Their developers (or ours) restyle those files however they like and upload them back. The content stays separate, so the client's team can still edit text, swap videos and update map locations in the admin tool afterwards without touching the design again.
The upload is checked automatically so a customised design can't break the player, the personalisation or the map, and every upload is kept as a version that can be rolled back. When we improve the platform, standard templates update by themselves; bespoke designs are told when a refresh is recommended.
The swipeable vertical video feed from the mobile exploration, an AI chat assistant, and the Campus Discovery page as a second page type. All three fit the platform model and can follow once the first two clients are live.