Culford School
An independent boarding and day school set in 480 acres of beautiful Suffolk parkland, with a Grade 2* listed 18th century building at its heart, Culford School asked us to build their new website.
The Brief
Culford is made up of four schools that welcome students aged from 3 through to 18 years of age. They were looking for a website which would attract prospective parents and pupils, encouraging them to enquire and visit the school. The site also needed to act as a “go to” source of information for current parents and pupils.
Their previous site was good but becoming dated with very little interactivity and cluttered pages. The content management system was also clunky and slow, leaving limited flexibility for content. Culford were looking for a fresh and modern looking website to act as an online brochure and provide a taste of life at the school.
As Culford consists of three schools within one site the new design needed to tie in with the different prospectuses for each school. It also needed to provide a link for Culford’s large alumni membership to their dedicated website www.culfordreunited.co.uk. Finally, as a commercial venue, with a Sports & Tennis Centre open to the public, and with parts of the site available for hire during the holidays, Culford also needed to promote the facilities on offer to private individuals, external groups and businesses.
With so much information needing to be easily found on their website it was important that the navigation be intuitive and easy to use, with visitors able to find what they are looking for in two or three clicks.
There needed to be more interactive elements such as videos, moving images and photo galleries. The site also needed to deal with more complicated functionality such as online bookings, news and event updates, and linking with their existing office systems so that content was automatically updated.
The Solution
Alberon created a visually engaging and interactive website built in a modern and easy to use content management system, Sitefinity, so their administrators can easily manage the content. We recommended Sitefinity as it offers plenty of scope for future expansion.
All of the features to enhance the visitor experience were built into the site to ensure Culford’s website had the modern feel it was looking for.
Technology
The website was built in Sitefinity CMS, using C# and SQL Server 2008 R2. Alberon used ASP.NET themes to achieve a different look and feel for the different sections of the site. Alberon created several custom-built modules and controls, such as Calendar, People and Tactical Boxes.
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