We were approached by Staffordshire Universities Academy Trust to design and maintain a high-performing and user-friendly, bespoke schools website. This website template would then be rolled out across the 20 remaining schools within the Trust.
The team would also embark on a series of training events to enable the Trusts’ staff and teaching staff to update the websites whenever they needed to. Allowing the schools greater control over their content and updates was a key factor in the success of this project.
Alongside the design of a new, standardised website for all schools within the Trust, The Education Agency team firstly needed to migrate the current websites onto its secure and responsive server.
All school information required re-uploading to the new websites. Using bespoke page builders, the team manually migrated the information – which also offered a timely opportunity for some ‘housekeeping’.
Rising to the challenge of a short timeline for completion, the team delivered the project on time, and under budget – launching all 21 websites in one week!
The Project
The Education Agency began the process by taking the time to fully understand what educators and their website audience really needed from a website.
By meeting with the trust and visiting each school, the project managers came to understand what the trust’s community really needed from a website.
The Challenge
Developing a page builder website template, which was bespoke to the trust and it’s schools came with a very specific challenge. Building website modules which would accommodate different category schools. The SUAT Website Template has to work for primary schools, high schools as well as the central trust website.
The Solution
The Education Agency team spent time researching and reviewing other websites, understanding what worked, what didn’t and what was actually important to the website user.
Once this piece was complete, the Design Studio designed a highly functional and flexible homepage which could be rolled out and adapted for all school ages, as well as a series of page builder elements which could be used to create tailored pages for each individual school.
The objective was to create a builder which would allow the schools their own, bespoke website which retained the unique needs and style of the individual school, whilst clearly showing consistency and association with the trust itself.
