St George’s School and Little Steps

The school website, shown here, is intended to act as both an online prospectus for the school and a site that can be used by existing parents to keep up to date with what is going on at the school.

Established in 1914, St. George’s School is a small independent school situated in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Little Steps nursery opened in 1991 in one room of St. George’s School and has grown since and is now run independently of the school. Initially tasked with updating the websites of both institutions, the remit of the work gradually extended to updating the printed material for both, as well as providing IT support and advice. I am currently in the process of upgrading the IT infrastructure of the school.

The Websites

The two websites are designed to reflect the different natures of the school and the nursery, while at the same time sharing enough similarities to reflect their shared heritage and common ground. So, both homepages use a similar layout:

A sketch of the layout of the two websites.

Where those boxes represent the following:

[colour bar]
[logo and name]
[navigation]
[images]
[welcome] [news and links]
[footer with contact details]

And this overall layout pattern is continued throughout the pages of both sites. However, the sites use different colour schemes and typography and so the overall effect is quite different.

The homepage of the St George’s School website, using the template described above.

The homepage of the Little Steps Nursery website, using the same template.

Paperwork

The most important step in updating all of the material produced by the school and the nursery was settling on the format of the logos to be used for both; and ensuring that they were applied consistently to all letterheads and other documentation. To ensure that these designs were used consistently, I developed a number of Word templates. This enables staff to focus on the content of what they are writing and discourages the creation of content that doesn’t fit with the new guidelines.

The School’s new letter format

The nursery’s new letter format

Technical details

The websites run on a linux debian server, using the latest version of WordPress. The WordPress themes are based on my own NewsClean theme, which itself uses the Starkers WordPress template and incorporates elements of the HTML Boilerplate and Twitter Bootstrap designs.