Portfolio

Cranleigh School
http://www.cranleigh.org

Project

Web and CMS development for a website and online marketing platform

Cranleigh School needed a multi-faceted, easy-to-manage web platform and online marketing system that would help it to inform and engage people and reduce its administration costs. The solution developed by Icreon is now used by many educational institutions as a benchmark for their own web development projects.

Technology:

Joomla, PHP, MyQL, Ajax and SMS.

Project requirements

Cranleigh is a leading independent school in the UK established in 1865. It has around 600 students aged 13-18, three-quarters of whom are boarders. With many of these students coming from overseas, the audience for the school’s new web platform – which includes members of staff, trustees and Cranleigh Foundation donors as well as students and their parents – is both international and diverse.

The school’s web platform needed to appeal to all of these stakeholders, to reflect Cranleigh’s position as a leading private education provider, to promote its ethos to prospective parents and students, and to provide a good understanding of the life, character and quality of the school. To make it quicker, cheaper and easier for Cranleigh to keep people informed and engaged, the web platform also needed to:

• Publicise sports fixtures and results
• Publicise a variety of other events both at the school and beyond, such as school trips
• Provide an easy, secure, accessible content management system (CMS) that would allow several members of staff to update the website’s content at once.

Our solution

Icreon began the project by working closely with Cranleigh to determine the school’s immediate and long-term needs and gain a clearer understanding of the needs of the people who would be using its new web platform. From this, we developed a flexible and adaptable Joomla CMS that was integrated into the design of a new website. Together, the new CMS and website allow the school to:

• Publish and manage a large number of informative and easy-to-find web pages
• Use multiple website editors with different roles and permissions
• Provide a fixture manager for students and parents, known as the Sports Desk (similar to that used by Sky Sports), to publicise forthcoming sports matches and subsequent results
• Invite parents to sign up for SMS notifications from the Sports Desk
• Provide a 360o virtual tour of the school’s facilities
• Provide news updates and other announcements through a bespoke noticeboard
• Allow users to personalise the website’s homepage with information that is most relevant to them.

How did Icreon’s web development expertise help Cranleigh?

The website, CMS and online marketing platform Icreon developed for Cranleigh allowed the school to:

• Reach a wider target audience
• Stand out from its peers
• Promote itself as great place for children to be educated
• Provide customisable and easy-to-find information for a variety of users
• Make it easy for administrators to manage the website’s content
• Allow the school to engage with parents quickly, easily and regularly
• Bring the school’s unique sense of community to its website.

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