Flow has been fortunate to work on a number of school websites lately, and the latest one to go live is the St Peter’s schools website.
Like some of the projects we have tackled before, St Peter’s was tricky as it was essentially three sites in one. The Girls Prep, Boys Prep and College all needed to have their own unique information conveyed, and their unique characters displayed, while still keeping within the larger St Peter’s identity.
Design and development played a big role in this endeavour. The site was developed as one site containing three individual mini-sites, each of which had to function independently, but have certain shared functionalities.
For instance, some pages were shared between the Girls and Boys Preps, but because each is a monastic school, images of girls and images of boys had to be displayed independently.
“I created a nifty bit of code that made it possible to load photos of girls and boys onto the same page,” says developer Alex Cowling (who also co-managed the project), “and dynamically swapped out pictures to ensure that only photos of boys were displayed when a visitor came from the boys’ mini-site and vice versa.”
Designer Lorraine Gumede also had to be clever about her use of the St Peter’s styles and colours. Colours throughout the site remained consistent with the St Peters colours, but these colours were used differently and on each school’s mini-site.
One of the special features of the site is a set of icons that takes users to pages about the sections of the children’s education. Lorraine cleverly used the same icon design for both the girls’ and boys’ mini-sites, but subtly changed the colours to reflect the different schools’ identities.
The mobile responsive site is cleanly and cleverly designed, while still embracing the three different schools’ individuality and similar core philosophies.
Jean Macleod, marketer for the Girls Prep, is happy with the site, telling us: “[There are] plenty of positive comments coming through regarding the website! Well done!”
The marketer for the Boys Prep, Diane Fraser, was also delighted with the way the project came together, saying: “I want to thank you for all the hard work and time spent on putting this website together. It is really looking great and I am really proud of it!”