NCEA - National Certificate of Educational Achievement

This project focused on rebuilding NCEA, a government website offering resources, updates and tools to help secondary teachers and schools prepare students for national qualification standards.

Stack

  • Drupal
  • Vue
  • HTML5
  • CSS
  • Sass
  • JavaScript
  • PHP
  • Docker
  • Algolia

LIVE

View Site

Project Purpose + Goal

The NCEA website rebuild aimed to enhance usability for secondary school teachers and leaders by making information and resources easier to find.

Features were designed with Drupal’s user workflow management in mind to support the site's need for frequent content updates.

Core Functionality

  • Content Taxonomies - redesigned taxonomy structures to improve content relationships
  • Site-wide Translation - enabled multilingual content with a toggle for users to switch languages.
  • Downloadable Resources - allowed users to download content in multiple formats.
  • Search - enhanced search functionality, enabling users to search and filter by resource type, learning area, and curriculum.
  • Subject Glossary - a tool for teachers to view and compare key assessment terms within and across learning areas.

Lessons Learned

I joined partway through the rebuild, and was mentored by two senior developers who played an important role in honing my dev skills post graduation from Dev Academy. Their guidance helped me deepen my understanding of clean code practices, accessibility-focused development, testing, responsive design, and collaborative coding approaches.

Subject Glossary

Building the initial iteration of the subject glossary was one of my first key responsibilities. I created a content glossary taxonomy within Drupal, which was then pre-processed to integrate with Algolia’s search API. This allowed users to filter and search for terms, while also viewing how those terms were used across different subject areas. There were several complex factors and logic considerations to make this functionality work seamlessly. I was also responsible for this feature end-to-end, developing a responsive and accessible front end with Vue.js for a smooth user experience.

Accessibility Focused Development

I also co-led an accessibility audit of the existing site content and structure. My colleague and I collaborated with the wider web team to research and implement a framework that would help developers, designers, and web advisors consistently follow accessibility best practices. As a result of this process, accessibility knowledge across the team grew significantly, allowing us to address existing issues and establish a clear approach to prevent future challenges.