Heyes Lane, new school website design and build

Our latest case study is Heyes Lane Primary School. This three-form entry school is located in Timperley, Greater Manchester and is relatively large, with 680 pupils, including a 52 place Nursery. The school benefits from extensive field and playground facilities, and one of the key strengths of this school is inclusivity as it serves a diverse local community. However, the school’s previous website was not a strength, as it did not meet their needs, particularly in terms of how the website functioned. Following this realisation, the teaching team at the school approached us to develop a website that better met the requirements of their pupils, parents and staff. 

How we designed a school website that addressed Heyes Lane school’s objectives

We design Ofsted compliant websites

Before we design a website for any school, college or further education organisation, we conduct a full review of the site to assess if this meets the criteria set by Ofsted and the Department for Education. Making your website Oftsed compliant is an essential part of our design process. We ensure that any school website that we build doesn’t just meet but, where possible, exceeds the standards required, as was the case for Heyes Lane school. Our compliance analysis of any existing school website feeds into the design plan for developing the new site. 

We future proof your website

Our website for Heyes Lane is designed to be responsive, which means that it can evolve as their school does. An essential factor of a responsive website allows it to be viewed properly on both phones, tablets, and laptops. This makes the website accessible to all devices. We future-proofed this and all of our school websites by ensuring that this site responds well to changes in technology. 

We make your website easy to update

Updating the information and content on your site is vital for any school. Our school websites are built using WordPress, an easy-use content management system (CMS) that allows the school to publish new content and make changes and updates to the information published online as they require. The site that we built for Heyes Lane allows their staff to quickly and easily post any school-related updates that they need, such as information on non-uniform days, sports events or anything else. This keeps the website properly updated and allows Heyes Lane to effectively engage online with pupils, parents and the wider community. 

Details of our new school website build project for Heyes Lane: 

We essentially built the new website entirely from scratch, as the school wanted to rewrite all of its content and information. The new website project was a perfect opportunity for our team and the school to go through all of their online content and give this a complete refresh, updating it, so it continues to meet their needs. 

From start to finish, the complete project took our team a total of six months. The site build and redesign was a long project because the number of pages was 72 in total, which is relatively high for a school of this size. We included new pages for each school year group, from Nursery to Year 6. We also linked the website to the school’s social media accounts, so parents can quickly go from the website to these accounts to follow Heyes Lane’s profiles and stay up to date with all the latest school news. 

The curriculum information is one of the essential sections of any school website, this content details what the children will learn throughout their education at the school. When designing a school website, we need to display this information clearly and in a detailed but engaging way. As part of outlining all of the pupils’ subjects for study, we also included a gallery of images in the curriculum content. This helps make the information more interactive and shows the pupils learning the subjects that are listed in the curriculum. 

To help keep parents and pupils up to date on the school year, we also built a term-time calendar into the website homepage. This feature shows important events in the school year, such as parents evening, term time dates, and school trips, such as visits to the Roman Experience in Chester.

We build all of our school websites to allow them to be viewed properly on all devices. It is important that your website is mobile and tablet friendly since many pupils and parents often use mobile devices to browse online. It is also important because Google prioritises websites that load well in mobile form when determining who comes first in search engine results. Addressing this aspect will help the new Heyes Lane school’s mobile-friendly website come above older non-mobile-friendly school websites when parents in the community are searching for local schools. 

As part of any new website build, we review the completed site to ensure that the information is fully compliant with Ofsted standards. As we finalised the Heyes Lane school website build, we ran a final Ofsted compliance report and verified that this new website meets compliance criteria. 

Building a well-performing website is only half of the job. It also needs to be well maintained. As part of our service, we always train school staff to use the new website to address this challenge, with training on all the website elements, functions, and features. This allows the school staff to get the most out of the new site, making edits to the site to publish fresh content and information correctly as they require. It is essential to continue communicating what is happening at the school with parents and the broader community, and online staff updates help facilitate this. This also keeps website content fresh and up to date. 

Heyes Lane school’s website had great feedback, and it has been very well received by pupils, parents, teachers and staff. This case study is only one of our success stories that we had the pleasure to share with you. If your school website needs a redesign so that your school can get the most out of its online presence, then contact us today.