A new responsive site for St Christopher's School
We have now delivered a completely secure and up to date responsive website that truly tells the story of this delightful and inclusive south coast school whilst maintaining clear paths to conversion for prospective parents, staff & pupils alike.
As mentioned elsewhere schools can be tricky projects; design and development phases can be extraordinarily lengthy - often exacerbated by key staff holidays and large management committees.
St Christopher’s is no exception to this despite them being a long standing and highly valued client of 3B’s of whom we are very fond. Design iterations, changes and scope creep can become a real issue in any project, and is frankly something of an inevitability when taking on school sites.
Accordingly what started out as a very simply responsive template redesign came, over time, to include an update to the Joomla CMS and content migration from K2 to Joomla core. The project spanned two years and the version of Joomla that was in place at the beginning of the project had become redundant and a security risk.
Fortunately St Christopher's senior management completely understood & accepted the need to revise the scope to accommodate this migration and core update. We have now delivered a completely secure and up to date responsive website that truly tells the story of this delightful and inclusive south coast school whilst maintaining clear paths to conversion for prospective parents, staff & pupils alike.
A new website for the Old Brightonians - the Alumni of the Brighton College
The brief was essentially very simple: maintain current functionality and content and migrate to the latest version of Joomla and a new fully responsive template.
We've been building and maintaining sites for Brighton College's Alumni since 1998. The last few iterations have all been on the wonderful Open Source Joomla platform and this latest version is no exception.
The brief was essentially very simple: maintain current functionality and content and migrate to the latest version of Joomla and a new fully responsive template - a process we're well used to and which normally runs smoothly and without too many issues.
The new site dovetails with their new Alumni database site (on Graduway) and neatly embeds their event booking system, meaning that the Joomla CMS isn't doing too much "heavy lifting" beyond the delivery of what has become a vast and varied body of tagged content across many categories. The challenge on sites like this is ensuring that "busy" doesn't become "cluttered" and I think with this client we've always achieved that, even going so far as to frequently demo the work to prospective and existing clients as a good example of content delivery.
The site - and its many versions over the years - also serves as a great indictment of this wonderful CMS; in many ways Joomla is far less configurable and versatile than Drupal, but when budget, time and client familiarity dictate it remains a popular and well proven weapon in our arsenal.
Brighton College "Remembering the Fallen"
Brighton College have been a client of ours for many years now and we were very happy to pitch SquareSpace to them as the platform upon which to deliver their newly launched online tribute to their fallen alumni in The Great War.
We are huge fans of SquareSpace – the increasingly ubiquitous cloud-based CMS that suits so many of the more simple web projects that we take on. The decision to deploy on this platform can be based on a number of factors, budget being just one; most often we propose SquareSpace to a client as a result of tight deadlines and / or the need for only a short-lived website. Another great advantage is the almost non-existent need for mandatory support ongoing – another requirement occasionally put before us.
Brighton College have been a client of ours for many years now and we were very happy to pitch SquareSpace to them as the platform upon which to deliver their newly launched online tribute to their fallen alumni in The Great War & Second World War.
Beyond these simple factors the requirements were reasonably typical in as much as an elegant site with a simple and intuitive CMS were essential, augmented with galleries, rich media, forms and links – all good stuff! SquareSpace offered a beautiful responsive template with built-in parallax scrolling that seemed perfect.
The main challenge was taking the spreadhseet of 147 alumni names and details and importing it into SquareSpace; the CMS allows for importing from WordPress only and so we had to import the spreadsheet as a blog into WordPress prior to a subsequent export and re-import into SquareSpace… all of which sounds a little more complicated than it was!
We’re delighted with the resulting website… and more importantly so is the client!