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Project overview

Helsby High School is a community secondary school and sixth form in Helsby, Cheshire. The school provides an excellent learning environment with an illustrious history.

Helsby High approached JC Creative to help them navigate a new digital presence as their website was showing its age. It was not only difficult to navigate, but on mobile and tablet devices it was completely nonresponsive. A mixture of poorly organised content, presented in a dated interface, led to many potential students, parents and teachers facing a very frustrating user experience, whilst visually the website didn’t represent their brand and its values.

Scope

Brand Workshop; UX/UI Sprints; UI Design; Web Development; Photography Art Direction;

Sector

Education

Objectives

Before developing their new digital brand, we invested a great deal of time understanding each user’s intent, along with the important information that they required from the site. This was carried out by researching and collecting data around the four sets of users which included students, parents, teachers and governors. The second stage of research involved a thorough understanding of their current traffic behaviour which included an extensive review of their Google Analytics account. The third stage was to ensure a fit-for-purpose website that met all Ofsted requirements and compliance.

From the research and data collected, it was clear there were a lot of pain points and drop off rates, so we developed a user journey tailored to each user’s requirements. This included a complete re-design of the navigation system which was segmented into the various user needs and provided further clarity. The amount of content and call to actions were reduced and a much simpler interface was developed. The primary aim was to provide each user with fewer options, more space and a clear path throughout the site. This approach helped us to avoid the common mistake of overloading the user with choices and helping them find the essential information quickly and easily.

The result

The user experience is much more refined, improving conversions and functionality on page. New photography was taken to showcase the school, its teachers, students and facilities. The branding was then brought inline with a completely new web experience that needed to show what Helsby High stands for including its values, high performance rate while also bringing its warmth and professionalism to the forefront.

To assist their in-house Marketing team we created a highly accessible website built in WordPress that allowed various admins to easily update and maintain the site moving forward. This allowed them to ensure the content was updated and fresh whilst supporting their digital marketing strategy. We have also delivered in-house training to the marketing team on the easy to use WordPress Content Management System.

The final delivery was a brand experience that was approachable and rooted in trust.