Objective
Greenvale Primary School aimed to overhaul their outdated and slow website with a modern, clean design featuring a simpler structure and navigation. They wanted to create a vibrant, welcoming online hub for the school community and prospective parents that would impress and attract new families, be easily updateable by staff, and comply with the Department of Education’s requirements for public information and policy dissemination.
Target audience
The website’s primary user groups are prospective parents considering the school for their children, and current parents seeking information about school policies, news, events, and classroom activities. The backend needed to be accessible for school staff responsible for posting updates, news and events, and maintaining the accuracy of various website sections.
Design rationale
The school didn’t want any change to its logo or brand colours, so the existing deep-green brand colour was used throughout. Together with the high-quality photos of students, this conveys a happy, friendly, welcoming and authentic feel. White space helps provide a clean, modern look, aids visual hierarchy and scannability. Fonts were chosen for their modern aesthetics, readability, and multi-language support.
An in-depth look at the previous website’s Google Analytics data informed the structure and layout, with the most important and commonly used sections easily accessible above the fold. This also led to many sections of the website being omitted entirely from this iteration since the data showed that they weren’t being used.
Technical implementation
WordPress was selected as the platform that best met the project’s scope, budget constraints and short timeline. Its intuitive and customisable dashboard allows staff to update content easily and provides functionality for customised user roles and role-specific dashboards. This not only makes for a more secure website, but improves UX for staff by providing access only to the dashboard sections they require. Choosing WordPress made it easy to balance development efficiency and ongoing site manageability.
Accessibility considerations
Accessibility was a priority in complying with legal requirements and ensuring a positive experience for all members of the school community. The website was developed with accessibility in mind at every stage, ensuring semantic HTML, thoughtful alt tags, adequate spacing for interactive elements, closed captions for video, high contrast colours, readable fonts, no text in images, and clear states for interactive elements. For downloadable content, accessible Word documents were used over PDF files where possible. Staff were also provided with guidelines to maintain accessibility standards in their content updates.
Reflection and improvement
Feedback from the school staff and community was glowing, and the client requested only one further iteration with very minor changes. However, this website build went live with an accessibility mistake that I’d like to correct. Some elements of the design (eg. the main navigation menu) use all-caps, which I’ve since learned will provide screen-reader users a poor experience. Still, I’m proud of the final product and the strategic process I applied to this project from beginning to end.