Victoria Academies Trust
Redesigning a family of academy school websites
About The Project
Victoria Academies Trust is a multi-academy trust that operates a family of nine primary schools across the West Midlands.
Frustrated by a lack of consistency between their school websites, the trust reached out to us for help. Several of their websites featured inconsistent designs and had been built with different content managements systems, each of which had their own set of tools for staff to learn.
In an effort to make life easier for the team, we were tasked with redesigning the most problematic sites and providing some much needed consistency.
Deliverables
Agency
Nettl of Stafford
Poppyfield Primary Academy
I started the process by redesigning the Poppyfield Primary Academy website. I chose to build the new sites using WordPress, which is the platform most of the trust’s other sites were built on and the one that staff were most familiar with.
I then redesigned the site from top to bottom so that information was more clearly presented and the design of the site was better aligned with the school’s brand guidelines.
Fibbersley Park Academy
The first step in the redesign process of the Fibbersley Park Academy website was to copy all of the content from the site’s original CMS over to WordPress. Once I’d done that, I worked with the team at the trust to restructure the site, merging or cutting content where necessary to create a fewer number of pages and a more clearly defined menu.
I then designed all of the pages, trying to maintain consistency with the Poppyfield site so that both felt like part of the same family.
I also helped the team with the management of their weekly radio show, Radio Station FPA. On their old site, the team had been uploading MP3 files for each show via WordPress and manually adding links for listeners to download the files from a dedicated page on their site.
To help simplify the process of uploading and managing episodes, I set the show up on podcasting platform, Anchor. I then added a podcast player to the site that displays all previously uploaded episodes and enables visitors to stream them. Now the team can manage the show much more efficiently.
