Website and Content Management System (CMS) Re-Design
Back at the forefront of online presence following our redesign of Bolton School
Background
Bolton School essentially has eight schools in total comprising a co-educational nursery, co-educational infant school, single sex junior schools and single sex senior schools including sixth forms. In addition the school operates several independent businesses including an events company, coach hire, wedding hire and outdoor pursuits firm. Previously all the different elements of the school had separate websites and the first commission for the Codebase team in 2006 was to design a brand new cohesive website that drew all the elements together on one single site. This site, was further enhanced in 2011 to ensure all the pages worked across modern devices and browsers making it one of the first fully responsive websites for any UK school.
The site, which was designed and developed from scratch, better represented the entire school with a single branding, unifying theme and common structure, whilst allowing the different components their own individuality.
However, whilst still functioning well and enabling easy administration, the site was recently starting to look a little dated, becoming information heavy in terms of content and other schools had caught up, and in some instances overtaken, in terms of design, look and feel.
The Process
Codebase undertook a full redesign project to refresh and restyle the main home page and landing page for each of the individual schools as well as de-cluttering what was now a 5 year old site. This is a large site with 4,000+ pages to test, so it was a large-scale project to ensure consistent navigation and usability.
The latest design is fresh, contemporary and more pictorially driven. The team worked hard to combine the elements of photography and news, keeping both prominent to ensure the visitor was visually inspired yet received the core information they needed easily.
The Result
De-cluttering the sites into one single, easy to view and navigate site had already vastly improved Bolton School’s online presence and SEO performance. The site’s content is managed by Bolton staff internally allowing for quick text and image changes. Bolton's internal team excel at keeping the site up to date.
The new redesign has brought the home page and core information pages up to date with a new attractive, contemporary feel, driven primarily by images. This has had a very positive response from users and once again positioned Bolton School at the forefront of online presence and visibility in the education sector.
John Newbould, Head of Marketing for Bolton School said: "We work well together with Codebase to develop and find solutions. We find common ground, we have big ideas and they find a way to make them work practically online. It’s always a quick and efficient service, we email and queries are usually sorted the same day. We are delighted with the new fresh look of our site."
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