Case Study
Updating the online presence of ‘outstanding’ historic high school
Prince Henry’s High School
The Client
Prince Henry’s High School in Evesham, Worcestershire, is a co-educational high school with academy status with around 1,280 enrolled students aged between 13 and 18.
The school has a successful history dating back 600 years and is named after Prince Henry, the elder brother of King Charles I. It was granted academy status in 2011 and has consistently achieved outstanding Ofsted reports.
In 2014, it was selected by the National College for Teaching and Leadership to become a National Teaching School and takes a leading role in recruiting and training new entrants to the profession.
The school’s guiding principle is for every child to achieve success through hard work. It aims for all students to leave Prince Henry’s with a first-class education that becomes fully embedded and integrated into their future lives. It strives to develop its students’ abilities and personal characteristics by actively promoting universal values such as initiative, enthusiasm, friendship, leadership, perseverance, commitment and self-discipline.
Enhanced online presence
Services Used
- Websites
- Branding & Design
- SEO
Respecting the past, looking to the future
The Challenge
The school’s leadership team approached QBD for help in developing a more modern and vibrant online presence that better reflected the school’s identity, story, activities and values.
The school constantly uploads new content and imagery to the site, so the website management system needed to be able to handle regular updates easily, while maintaining its modern look and high-end feel.
It also needed a simpler, more intuitive navigation structure to ensure the user journey is quick and easy, while reflecting the school’s full curriculum and all its essential information for students, parents/carers and the wider community.
A fresh approach
The Solution
We held several in-depth discussions with the Senior Leadership Team and Marketing Manager to establish the project’s scope and objectives.
Our first task was to evolve the school’s distinctive branding to give it a cleaner, more modern look and feel while ensuring it continued to reflect the school’s history and heritage. This built on our previous creative work for the school, when we were tasked with designing new crests for its five houses – Burlingham, Deacle, Holland, Lichfield and Workman.
The updated branding was applied across the website to enhance its visual appeal.
Because the website needs to host lots of content and information, the navigation was split across two user journeys: ‘Our School’ and ‘Our Curriculum’.
The ‘Our Curriculum’ menu includes information organised by year group and subject area, so students and parents/carers can find the information they’re looking for within one click.
For the ‘Our School’ menu, we created a custom navigation, split into 12 areas, based on the acrostic ‘Prince Henry’s’. Again, relevant information is just one click away.
The new website homepage, meanwhile, is clean, modern and picture-led to ensure it reflects the full range of activities on offer at the school, along with key dates and information, accreditations, certifications and partnerships, and contact details. The site is fully responsive to provide a smooth visitor experience, whatever device it’s being viewed on.
Instant visibility
The Impact
The new website enables the school to convey the right message to existing students and their parents/carers, prospective or incoming students, and the broader education community.
Its branding and visual identity reinforce the school’s reputation within the region’s education community.
The simple-to-use content management system makes it easy for the school’s admin team to add new content and updates, to keep the homepage vibrant and image-led. It’s also extremely easy to manage, meaning the team doesn’t need any specialist external support with day-to-day website activities.
The website is now much more accessible across the full range of devices and conforms to modern web standards to ensure it can be viewed by as wide an audience as possible.
“Prince Henry’s is long-established as an ‘Outstanding’ school in our area.
“We’re an ambitious, growing school and a registered Teaching Hub, so we need a strong online presence to link us with other schools across the region.
“Our new website gives us complete confidence to convey not just our excellent curriculum provision but also the extra-curricular activities and enrichment our students enjoy.
“QBD’s work in bringing our website to life was excellent. They have the in-house expertise to overcome all the technical issues and challenges with a project of this scale. They also have the creativity and imagination to bring our school to life on screen, and give us a website we are all very proud of.”