St Michael’s Catholic College

Secondary school and sixth form college in South London

The Story

St Michaels is a Catholic and comprehensive college based in the Bermondsey, South London that caters for student at GCSE and A-level grades (ages 11-18).

We’ve worked closely with the college for a number years building a great working relationship and picking up a few gems along the way. Being connected to various school networks has given us deep insight into the design and build of successful education focussed websites.

The college had gone through a huge structural transformation and extension and so felt it was necessary to follow suit with a redesign and build of the website, as well as the design and print of a new school prospectus – both jobs of which were awarded to us.

Our Approach

We approached this project as a rework from the ground up and collated valuable information from teachers, pupils and parents by means of focus-groups. We were able to look retrospectively at the underlying issues that they faced when using the website.

Almost all cases were related to requests for new functionality and how it no longer reflected the St Michaels brand. Given the change the college had gone through, we agreed.

Work Delivered:

UI/UX Design
WordPress Development
Progress 8 Integration
Print and design

An understanding of governing bodies

Ofsted compliance have shifted a lot of their attention to school websites and what should be published on the website as per gov.uk’s guidelines. We paid very close attention to this ensuring that St Michaels had the facilities via the admin panel to clearly display the documents as required.

Included in our deliverables was solution that would enable St Michaels to stay updated with the latest policies.

Functionality

From our user research sessions with the St Michaels community, we had a definitive list of features that they wanted on the website. The features were very useful and effectively made the website a one-stop-shop for all school-related content. For instance, St Michaels operate an in-house points system where form groups collect points from various activities and reward teams accordingly. We made this accessible by developing a feature within the platform that allowed students to view their teams scores amongst other information. We also built a mechanism that, albeit manually as there’s no API available, displays the Progress 8 Scores of the school.

Content that flows

Academic websites contain a lot of information based content and therefore can be text heavy. Text heavy websites tend to be messy with improper page structures. We invested a great amount of effort looking in to the sitemap and architectural build of the website. As a result:

users can find information quickly through titles and category based grouping
discoverability is much improved. Visitors are shown links that relate to current content that they might not have known about.

Content heavy websites often tend to lose their visual appeal, we made sure that the end result was pleasant to use as well as look at.

A website that looks good

Just as much effort that was put into research had gone in to design. Although we focussed solely on research and user experience first, the end results was a visually engaging interface. We aligned the online work we delivered with the offline materials we created. The essence of uniformity across all media types is felt.

The design assets that we had created and used for the website including colours, fonts etc became the visual pillars for other materials that St Michaels would use for marketing.

Prospectus design + print

To coincide with the launch of the new website, we delivered the design for the new prospectus. Our graphics design team crafted beautiful visuals complimented by the photography of the new building and students going about their daily activities.

Project Form