When Performing Arts school Ratton School approached us for a new website, we started having a good look around at other school websites. We couldn’t believe what we saw! It was just about the worst collection of websites we’d ever seen.

We looked at a supposedly award winning school websites, and found not only a myriad of online sins, but banner ads for gambling and forum spam about Viagra – in a primary school website! (NB: Don’t mess with ad serving technology unless you know what you’re doing, and learn when it’s appropriate to moderate a forum.)

So we got really excited, because we knew that not only would we make the Ratton School website stand out from the rest, we’d make it the best school site in England!

Before we spent the school’s precious marketing budget, we decide to conduct a survey, both online and in printed format, of all the schools’ students, parents and staff to find out what was important to the different user groups and what wasn’t. The results were collected into an insightful report outlining things that VGroup and Ratton wouldn’t have necessarily concluded on their own. We then knew exactly where to spend the budget.

We discovered that security and electronic communications were the most important to parents, ease of administration and flexibility was the most important to staff, and options for user-generated content was the most important to students.

So we set about to produce a creative, secure, intelligent and accessible website that ticked all these boxes – and some – within the client’s budget.

Here’s what the client had to say at the end of it all;

“Building a website for a large secondary school is not an easy task, however, our experience with creating a website with VGroup has been a complete success.

Our new school website is aimed at a diverse range of audiences, from students to visitors of the school. The site had to encompass a wide variety of faculty areas as well as all the other components that make up a successful school. VGroup designed our website to fit in with our status as a specialist performing arts college by creating illustrations that were both vibrant and relevant to the schools ethos.

Their Content Management System has been excellent for a school environment, enabling students and staff to make changes to the website easily and efficiently. The functionality of the CMS allows flexibility whilst ensuring the sites standards are adhered to.

Throughout the process we received excellent service from the team at VGroup as well as regular contact with our account manager. VGroup delivered a website in a clear and simple way eliminating any complexity from both the roles of the day-to-day website editors to the everyday users spanning the large community of our school."

Paul Fitzpatrick – IT Manager, Ratton School

Design
The website design incorporates a bespoke illustration style designed to reflect the artistic and creative nature of the School, and engage with current and prospective students, who are too often overlooked as key audiences in school website projects.

Security and Integration
Using the VGroup CMS as a framework, we created a site that allows parent to log in to view private news and event information, students to edit content and submit for approval, and staff to maintain department sections of the site.

The website and CMS is integrated with Ratton School’s LDAP server so that student, parent and staff logins are the same as their school network logins, and managed using existing school admin systems without the need to manage website permissions etc separately.

User-generated Content
Resource for maintaining content managed websites can be an issue for all organisations, so we encouraged Ratton to use the students to write for and update parts of the website, and build this into related classes, such as ICT, journalism, etc. Permissions are controlled easily through the schools LDAP server, and all student edits are tracked to prevent mis-use of the site.

Communications
News, events and information edited via the CMS can be published as either public content, or private content that can only be viewed inside the school network or by parents and students logged in over the internet.

Short news bulletins uploaded via the CMS are transmitted to parents via email or SMS, whichever they prefer. This method has cut the cost and effort of issuing paper bulletins to parents which often get lost and allows easy targeting of messages to certain families based on what year students are in.

Parents can also sign up for the website’s RSS news feed, to get news instantly on their mobile phone or computer at home or work.

Accessibility
As well as conforming to W3C Web Standards (as with all VGroup websites), the Ratton School website was developed to meet AA level of the UK Accessibility Guideslines for websites, ensuring that students and parents with disabilities are able to use the website with ease.

Ratton School’s new website has been a hit with parents and students alike, and solved many problems internally for the school. VGroup is now looking to work with other schools, of all levels, with the hope of using the thinking behind rattonschool.co.uk to lift the standard of online communications for schools across the UK.