We were tasked with building a fully editable responsive website for the largest secondary school in Liverpool with our partners Media and Digital.
Alsop High School has over 1700 students and the website needs to communicate the schools core values, ethos, its facilities as well as housing all the relevant information, policies and documents for all interested parties (such as parents, staff, students, governors, Ofsted). All this information must also be kept relevant and up-to-date which can be a massive undertaking.
A new fully responsive website was developed for the school, with a low maintenance content management system that is extremely easy to use allowing staff to quickly update content at short notice and with minimal computer skills required. Because the website is so ease to update more staff were trained spreading the effort of maintaining the site across more people within the team. This combination of non-techie interface and more hands to help maintain the site means our editable school websites do get regularly updated becoming a valuable, online marketing and information point.
Responsive School Website tested across all major browsers & devices
Over recent years, it has become increasingly important to have a site which works as well on mobile as on desktop. More websites are now loaded on smartphones and tablets than on desktop computers. And this is particularly true of the users of school websites, so they need to be able to access the information they want quickly whether on a computer, tablet or mobile.
Responsive websites are built on a flexible, fluid grid so they adapts and reformat to the browser or device that is rendering the website.
Mobile is now a key user-base with Multi Device users on the internet now at an average of +60%
Visually Dynamic Image Slideshow System - engaging image call-to-action
The strength of this system is that it is easily customizable by the website editor. With each slide able to have a different image, fully editable overlaid text and specific weblink applied so the slideshow becomes a practical key call-to-action feature.
Also there are style variations prepared so it can be used across the site as banners and within the page content areas adding real visual impact.
Dynamic Header Slideshow | In-page Images slideshow | Photo Gallery & Light-box Functionality
Schools always have things going on, communicating this active calendar to everyone can be time consuming and potentially take great forethought and planning to make sure everyone is informed.
To help alleviate the efforts required, our school websites feature an inbuilt calendar system. This allows members of staff to add all their future events which can easily be flicked through by all users of the website. The system has a powerful 'Date Ranges' feature enabling website editors to setup an events which can repeat daily, weekly or monthly to massively simplify adding recurring dates.
Many of our schools add all the information to their calendar system at the beginning of the school year, the website is then smart enough to display upcoming events on the home page so everyone can see the next five events.
Utilising Google Maps on the contact page for highlighting your location and integrated directions tools can massively enhance the usability of the contact page, especially as this is all fully functional on desktop and mobile so is completely interactive on the move.
This could even be utilises within other areas of the site where location is a factor, so for example all events could have the option to include a dynamic map as part of the layout based on the postcode of added for the event.
Image Slideshow
Calendar Element
Photo Gallery
Social Media Integration
Google Map Integration
