Project Overview

Saint Basil Academy is a college preparatory high school for young women located in Jenkintown, just outside of Philadelphia. The school’s previous website was outdated and they needed a new, modern website to highlight their strong academic curriculum, extensive athletic program and varied extracurricular activities. The new website fulfills several goals, including attracting potential students (and their parents) to choose SBA and serving as a digital presence for the thousands of SBA alumnae who continue to connect with and support the school.

Website Evaluation

Before thinking about aesthetics, we began by creating a site map (a visual chart of all the pages that will be included) of the existing website. From there, we reorganized the site content and added new features, like daily announcements and alumnae news identified in the scope of work for the project. As with all of our projects, the site map evaluation process is essential as the final site map functions as a guide for us to create an initial design concept.

Color Coding for Design & Functionality

During our research and design process, we identified seven primary content areas of the SBA website: About, Admissions, Academics, Student Life, Athletics, Alumnae, and Giving. Each section is a wealth of information specific to the topic area, so we chose to color-code each section. From a functionality standpoint, users can easily identify that they are browsing within one topic area or moving onto another topic. This choice also allowed us to add a playful, visual element to the overall website design. The design primarily relies on the school’s classic colors of blue and gold. The bright, additional colors function as link colors, backgrounds, and heading colors for each section.

Custom Icons for Academics, Sports & Clubs

The new Saint Basil Academy website features a variety of icons for use on blog posts and daily announcements. While the default icon is the paw print of the school’s panther mascot, over 50 unique icons were created to customize posts for various academic, student life and athletic areas. This design feature allows the school to provide a better user experience for its students, alumnae and community.

Personalized WordPress Training

The SBA website includes a ton of custom development; on the homepage, we created a space for curated news and events. The school’s webmaster can easily update and manage this content by adding new photos, customizing headlines, and creating eye-catching buttons to guide visitors to explore more content. Blinebury Design provided several in-person training sessions and custom video tutorials (like this sample tutorial).

Deliverables:

• Website design and development
• Responsive layout
• Custom daily announcements system with unique iconography
• In-depth faculty and staff directory with course assignments
• Interactive contact forms for information requests, alumnae news updates, and prayer requests