DDSN Interactive plans, designs, builds and continuously improves digital platforms for Australian education — universities and their residential colleges, TAFEs and training providers, schools and scholarship organisations. We've done it for more than a decade, on platforms we still support today.
The problem, as education teams describe it
A small marketing team answering to many masters: faculties and departments each wanting their corner of the site, a brand that drifts a little further with every update, and a student cohort that lives on their phones while the website assumes a desktop. Meanwhile the systems don't talk to each other — admissions in one place, events in another, alumni in a spreadsheet — and every accessibility audit lands on your desk with the same findings as the last one.
None of this is a content problem. It's a platform problem, and it's fixable.
Website, native student app and alumni portal on one Australian-made platform — built for residential colleges, not adapted for them. Meals management, admissions workflows and alumni mentoring arrive as ready modules, hosted and supported locally.
Marketing website, student and family app, admissions portal and alumni giving on one Australian-made platform — works out of the box, customised to your school. Single sign-on with Office365, SAML or Active Directory, and analytics built for enrolment and engagement, not just traffic.
For universities and multi-faculty institutions where a single-college platform isn't the right shape. Where you require content production at scale across faculties, AI-personalised recruitment marketing, and admissions funnels tied to your student systems.
Five disconnected systems for admissions, billing, meals, rooms and communications become one — Acora handling the relationship, RMS Cloud handling the room, certified and integrated so a student record never has to be re-entered twice.
Purpose-built or product-powered — both delivered by DDSN, so this is the honest comparison, not a pitch for one. See where Acora's ready-made college modules win, where Kentico's marketing depth and global certification win, and how to choose for your institution.
What we build for education
Websites that carry the whole institution
Multi-site content management with distributed authoring — faculties and departments publish within a design system that keeps the brand whole, with workflow and permissions so nothing goes live by accident.
Student engagement, on their phones
Native iOS and Android apps for news, events and campus life — through to meals management, maintenance requests and push notifications for colleges that run residential communities.
Admissions and enquiry workflows
Application forms, tour bookings and enquiry management connected to your student management system and CRM, so prospective students move from first click to enrolment without falling between systems.
Alumni and advancement
Directories, mentoring, jobs boards, events and giving — the relationships that outlast graduation, on the same platform as everything else.
Portals and intranets
Private, authenticated content for students, staff and boards, with single sign-on against your existing identity provider.
Our work in this sector
The Gordon TAFE, Geelong
An award-winning rebuild around live course data: the TechOne student management system feeds the website by API, so 100+ nationally accredited qualifications are entered once and published everywhere. Full URL mapping held search rankings through the migration. The result: Kentico Site of the Month (February 2025), a Kentico Site of the Year 2025 Honourable Mention, and a 5.0 rating on Clutch.
Read about The Gordon project
Trinity College, University of Melbourne
A continuous partnership since 2015: three platform migrations, two UX projects and three student portals. The 2024 redesign streamlined a 900+ page site, cut navigation from four layers to three while adding a sixth navigational area, and held organic search performance through the restructure. The College reported an uptick in high-quality student applications following launch, and the site earned a Kentico Site of the Year (Education) Honourable Mention.
Read about the Trinity College relationship
St John's College, University of Queensland
A unified platform replacing multiple legacy systems: marketing website, iOS and Android student app with meals management, alumni portal with mentoring and jobs, and integrated email marketing. One managed platform where there were many.
Explore the St John's digital platform
New College, UNSW
Runs the Acora College platform alongside St John's, in a shared-development community where features funded by one college roll out to all. Its meals app handles complex meal-credit rules across two campus buildings, integrated with point-of-sale, cutting food losses and data-entry errors. The newest additions: a student application portal and a current-student portal, replacing StarRez with the platform the college already runs.
New College full lifecycle student engagement
What your IT team will ask...
Hosting is on DDSN's Australian private cloud: security-hardened, third-party penetration tested, constantly monitored, with all core infrastructure inside Australian jurisdiction and dev, staging and live environments included. Kentico builds can also run as single-tenant SaaS on Microsoft Azure with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certification. Builds are documented and standards-based — no black boxes, no lock-in — and support doesn't end at launch: help desk, telephone support and pre-booked hours you can spend on anything from technical fixes to content and design.
Accessibility is engineered in, not promised. Education carries public obligations here, and our builds are delivered to WCAG 2.1 AA — we recently achieved AA compliance across all 1,200 pages, content and forms of a national member platform, delivered five weeks from kickoff.
Where this connects
An education platform earns more when the pieces work in unison: private cloud hosting keeps it fast and sovereign, SEO and analytics show you which courses and campaigns pull enquiries, and a continuous improvement retainer means the platform in year three is better than the one that launched. Strategy, design, build, optimise — then keep optimising.
Common questions
Acora College — our own Australian platform for residential colleges — and Xperience by Kentico for universities and larger institutions. We host and support both, and recommend between them based on your requirements.
Yes. Our education work spans university residential colleges, higher education, vocational institutes and scholarship organisations — anywhere a small team has to run a large digital presence.
We build to WCAG 2.1 AA as standard — validated across pages, content and forms, not just the homepage — and our own brand system is contrast-verified before a project starts. Accessibility findings get fixed in the build, not filed in a report.