Stretford High School Website Design

With a growing reputation for academic excellence and a growing student population, Stretford High School had outgrown their outdated WordPress based school website design. With government OFSTED rules now requiring all schools to have and maintain an up-to-date and accessible website, Quentin James Design was tasked with designing and building a new, bespoke, mobile-friendly WordPress school website design for the staff, students and parents.

Services Provided

  • School Website Design

The Brief

Nestled between Old Trafford Football and Cricket grounds, Stretford High School is located close to Manchester’s metro tram link and is just a short walk from the bustling Media City development at Trafford Park. The school is one of the most popular choices for families in the Trafford area and will shortly celebrate its 25th Anniversary.

With new government OFSTED rules now covering school websites, the senior leadership team at Stretford High School needed to update their ageing website with a clean, fresh school website design that was mobile-friendly and easy to access for staff, students and parents alike. As the day-to-day updates would be done in-house by Stretford High School staff, a simple, familiar Content Management System was a requirement. As the in-house team at Stretford High School were already familiar with WordPress, albeit an older version, the WordPress Content Management System was selected as the best option.

The senior leadership team at Stretford High School were also keen on the idea that the new school website design be created using as many open standards as possible. To make the new Stretford High School website design mobile-friendly and fully responsive, we used the open source Bootstrap front-end framework. Bootstrap is a sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile first front-end framework designed for faster and easier web development. It’s light-weight, yet powerful and is our go-to framework for developing mobile first websites.

School Website Design

With the new Stretford High School website design needing to accommodate a great deal of mandatory content we created a fast, flexible framework and layout for the internal website pages. This was complimented by a hidden ‘off-canvas’ website navigation menu system with accompanying ‘breadcrumbs’ to aid the user experience.

The off-canvas menu slides in from the right-hand side of the screen, saving valuable screen real-estate on all devices from laptops, to tablets, to smartphones. Once the first or second level page of choice is reached, the sub navigation switches to the internal page sidebar, enabling multiple levels of pages to be reached without confusion or a complicated series of drop-down lists. The new Stretford High School website design carefully guides the user to the page they want – it doesn’t give them an overall map expecting them to work out their route themselves!

The new Stretford High School website design closely follows their existing corporate branding identity, using their choice of fonts, colours and design rules. Each website page design incorporates a large feature image at the top of the page, a handy search bar and all of the school’s main contact details.

WordPress Website Design

With the new school website design being WordPress based, the team at Stretford High School can edit, update and maintain the website in-house on a daily basis. Students at Stretford High School are also contributing content for the new website, further enhancing the perspectives and information offered online. The new school website design will enable Stretford High School to comply with all of the current OFSTED rules, further improving their overall OFSTED rating. The website now allows prospective students and parents to get a better understanding of the learning environment at Stretford High School and what the school has to offer from an education perspective. Current students and parents can keep up-to-date with school news, timetables and can access a wide variety of online school services.

Stretford High School Website Design Brand Guidelines
Stretford High School Website Design OFSTED
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Complete Care Shop

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Find Your Inner Unicorn

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