The client

Earlsfield Primary School is a Wandsworth based school who teach children from nursery and reception to year 6.


The challenge

Earlsfield had an existing website that was managed and updated on their behalf for which they paid an annual service charge for. They were keen to bring the management of the website in-house so the school office could make regular updates themselves as and when they needed to, whilst saving money by not requiring the annual service charge.

Earlsfield wanted to maintain the strong colour scheme and feel of the existing website whilst bringing it more up to date.

Other than the content management system, specific challenges were:

• To be able to embed their own content (photo slideshows, videos and audio podcasts) within the site quickly and easily,
• Upload PDF newsletters as and when developed,
• Make it easy for parents to get in touch with a guest book,
• Find a solution to quickly and easily get important messages to parents, such as school closures due to snow.
  
  

What we did

As with all of our projects, we started with a meeting with teachers and administrators at Earlsfield to gather the requirements and understand their challenges. Once we had this onboard, we were able to provide several mock-ups of what the site could look like, with one being picked to move on to the development stage.

A test version of the site was then built so it could be seen in action before signing off the design and moving on to the build.

The main technology challenge was the news alerts. We decided the best way to do this was to embed a Twitter feed on the homepage of the website. This means that a member of the school office can easily update Twitter from a PC or their smartphone with the latest news, for example if the school is closed because of snow. Parents can then either view that information on the school website, or they can subscribe to the Twitter feed and have the alerts sent directly to their own computer or smartphone. In a short period of time, over 70 parents were following the Twitter feed.

We then worked with Earlsfield to get a Vimeo account set up so that they could embed video in their website, a Zenfolio account for photo galleries and slideshows, and a DropBox account so that they could embed audio podcasts.

The site was built on the Adobe Contribute content management system (CMS) and 70% populated with content and copy provided by the school. We then went in with a training manual and trained the school office on how to update the site, create new pages and embed content. They would populate the remaining 30% of the content so they could get used to using the CMS, whilst we provided support and answered questions.

The results

We're not only really proud of how the site looks, but also at how quickly the school office have embraced running and updating the website. We often look back to see what the latest content is and this includes some recent editions whereby they've learnt to embed new content such as PowerPoint slide decks.