Albyn School were in the process of transitioning from a single-sex all-girls school into a mixed school, as well as modernising their appearance. Following on from brand development, we were tasked with updating the website to follow through this new look. www.albynschool.co.uk
Albyn School was traditionally an all-girls school, but had decided to change this to become a mixed school for both girls and boys. This meant a holistic change to how the school was perceived and how the school marketed itself. From a web perspective, we used the updated, vibrant and colourful look as an opportunity to showcase photography of both the boys and girls. The facilities at Albyn School are also modern and the website look was reflective of this.
Being a school which caters for so many different age ranges, the amount of information required to be on the website is quite vast. The previous website suffered from difficult and clunky navigation meaning users were often frustrated or unable to find content. We spent time understanding how to enhance the user experience and provide simplified navigation via "megamenu" dropdowns. We wanted users to be able to click straight into the pages they wanted to access without having to load several pages in between.
Another difficult factor which we had to design a solution for was the potential users of the website. Albyn School has to deliver information to parents of students who already visit the school and are visiting for specific information, but it aso has to cater for parents of prospective students who are looking for a totally different set of content. Therefore the navigation is inherently simple and aimed at users who are visiting for the first time, but also enables return visitors to navigate quickly to the content they require.
With the level of content within the content management system, Albyn School were hesitant to move to another system and reimagine the website structure. However, this presented its own challenges such as building the new website within the confines of the live website. The solution we delivered retained the existing CMS and built the new styles in isolation until the new look was ready to go live.
To keep parents engaged, we built in the functionality to sign up for an automatic biweekly email update. The email features all content that has been updated or added since the previous email was sent and allows parents to keep up to date with news, blogs and recent school activities.
Obviously some content that parents need access to is of sensitive nature. With this in mind, we made sure that selected content could be password protected via the CMS. This meant that regular updates can be accessed online rather than relying on forms being sent out via the pupils.
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