CA18461 · Website Development Services
Six websites.
One college
group.
Before writing a word of the tender response, we audited every public page DN Colleges Group operates — all 3,648 URLs across six separate websites. Everything below is built from that live data, not from assumptions.
Live figures pulled 16 September 2026 from each site's own XML sitemaps, plus Google ranking data for the UK.
humberenergy.co.uk runs the same WordPress codebase but isn't on a .ac.uk domain at all.
01 · Discovery, already done
The estate is one codebase pretending to be six brands.
All six sites already share a single WordPress base-theme with per-site child
themes (dc-child, nlc-child, ucnl-child, ucdon-child,
dncg-child, hesta-child) and shared custom plugins
dncg-search, dncg-course-compare and dncg-pathways.
That is genuinely good news. The hard engineering already exists — there is even a
/dncg/v1/cross-site/courses REST endpoint with webhooks. This commission is not a
rebuild. It is consolidation, information architecture, content rationalisation and search
recovery on top of a platform that already works.
Pages that are already near-identical across sites
Body-text similarity measured by fetching both live pages and diffing the rendered content. 32 of 108 sampled duplicate pairs are more than 80% identical.
| Page | Similarity | Appears on | Words |
|---|
02 · What it costs in Google
Four of your own listings, and someone else takes number one.
For "colleges in doncaster" — 18,100 searches a month — DN Colleges Group occupies positions 2, 4, 5 and 8. Four separate domains splitting the same authority. New College Doncaster takes position 1 with one.
Live SERP: "colleges in doncaster"
18,100 / month| Search term | Volume | Your competing pages |
|---|
Showing the largest 24 of 119. Full list supplied as CSV.
And the upside nobody is collecting
494 keywords already rank in positions 4–20 — page one or page two, but not where the clicks are. Combined volume: 560,470 searches a month. Consolidation plus proper course schema is the cheapest way to move them.
| Search term | Volume | Current | Site |
|---|
03 · The consolidation
One estate. Campuses as sections, not silos.
A learner does not care which legal entity runs the course. They care what they can study, where, and what it leads to. The proposed structure puts subject first and campus second — and each campus keeps a real home that can still win local search.
Every one of the 3,648 existing URLs has already been assigned a destination. The generated redirect map is a deliverable of this preview, not a promise.
Today
- Six domains, six navigations, six footers, six cookie banners
- 226 page slugs that exist on more than one site
- 408 of 413 careers pages duplicated between UC Doncaster and UC North Lincolnshire
- 187 course titles published as separate pages on 2–4 sites
- 43 different subject-area labels, several differing only by capitalisation
- A learner comparing two campuses must open two websites
Proposed
- One domain, one navigation, one consent layer, one search
- Group pages exist exactly once — policies, term dates, complaints, privacy
- One careers library shared by both university campuses
- One course record; campus and study mode become options on the course
- 16 canonical subject areas, mapped from the existing 43
- Compare campuses inside one course page
Redirect map, generated
Produced by crawling every sitemap and applying the consolidation rules. Downloadable as CSV, ready to become an nginx map or a WordPress redirect table.
Proposed information architecture
2,676 pages, down from 3,648dncolleges.ac.uk/ ├── study/ 601 course records (was 877 pages) │ ├── subjects/<subject>/ 16 canonical subject hubs │ └── <course>/ campus + mode are options, not separate pages ├── campuses/ │ ├── doncaster-college/ local landing, keeps local search intent │ ├── north-lindsey-college/ │ ├── university-campus-doncaster/ │ ├── university-campus-north-lincolnshire/ │ └── humber-energy-skills-academy/ ├── university-level/ UCD + UCNL merged HE offer ├── apprenticeships/ ├── employers/ workforce development, was on the group site ├── careers/ one copy of 413 careers + 30 pathways │ └── pathways/<pathway>/ ├── student-life/ support/ news/ events/ └── about/ policies, governance, term dates — single instance ├── documents/ one merged document library └── people/ one staff directory
04 · Working prototype
The unified course finder, running on your real catalogue.
Not a screenshot. This is 601 real merged course records scraped from your five public sites on 16 September 2026, searchable across the whole group for the first time.
Type a subject, filter by level or campus. Courses flagged on 3 sites are ones currently published as separate competing pages.
Course titles and descriptions are DN Colleges Group's own, used here solely to demonstrate the consolidation. Subject areas have been normalised to the proposed 16-term taxonomy.
05 · How we keep it healthy
An agentic SEO loop, not a one-off report.
Most agencies hand over a spreadsheet at launch and the estate decays from week one. We hand over a running loop: it crawls, compares against the live search data, writes the fix, opens a pull request, and verifies the result after Google recrawls.
Everything in the panels below was produced by that loop against your live sites this week.
Crawl
live nightly06 · Legal baseline
Accessibility is a duty, not a feature.
As a public sector body, DN Colleges Group is bound by the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018. The target is WCAG 2.2 AA plus a published, accurate accessibility statement.
This preview page is itself built to that standard — skip link, visible focus, semantic landmarks,
live regions on the filter, full keyboard operation, and prefers-reduced-motion honoured.
We would not pitch accessibility on an inaccessible page.
07 · Delivery
26 October 2026 → 30 June 2027.
Eight months, five phases, working software from week four. The brand arrives from your separately commissioned agency mid-programme — so we build brand-agnostic first and apply tokens later, which means a brand delay never becomes a project delay.
08 · Commercials
£15,000 fixed.
Against a £25,000 ceiling. Fixed price, fixed scope, no day-rate drift. The remaining £10,000 of your budget stays available for content production, photography or contingency — the three things that actually slip on projects like this.
- Discovery, audit & content rationalisation£2,400
- Information architecture, user journeys & prototyping£2,600
- WordPress multisite consolidation & brand application£4,800
- Migration & the 3,648-row redirect programme£2,200
- SEO, structured data & the agentic loop handover£1,800
- Accessibility audit, testing, launch & training£1,200
- Total£15,000
What is already done, before award
- Full six-site crawl — 3,648 URLs inventoried
- Duplicate-content analysis across all page types
- Live UK ranking data for every domain, 119-keyword cannibalisation register
- Proposed information architecture
- Complete page-level 301 redirect map, as CSV
- Canonical 16-term subject taxonomy mapped from the existing 43
- Working unified course finder on 601 merged real course records
- Generated
Coursestructured data, currently absent from all 877 course pages
Tender closes 29 September 2026, 12pm, via MultiQuote reference CA18461.