Taking a school website from glitchy to great
Case study: Ashley Junior School
When you want to make an excellent first impression and stand out from the crowd, you can trust the UK’s largest provider of school websites. Juniper’s school website design offering combines the expertise of two industry leaders, Primarysite and e4education.
About the school
Ashley Junior School, located in New Milton, Hampshire, has been an integral part of the community for generations. Rated 'Good' by Ofsted, the school takes pride in offering an exceptional educational experience. The extensive campus provides excellent teaching and learning opportunities, ensuring every child enjoys a fulfilling school life.
Led by Headteacher Mrs Bartolomeo, the school lives by its core values of being 'Ready, Respectful, and Responsible' to guide pupils to become independent and reflective thinkers and develop a lifelong love for learning.
Paul Cousins ICT Systems Manager, Ashley Junior School
The need for a refreshed and reliable website
The need for a new and improved website prompted Ashley Junior School to seek a change in their website provider. The school's previous provider had stopped offering support, and the website frequently crashed when adding content, creating significant challenges. After extensive online research and a recommendation from their IT service provider, Harraps, Paul Cousins, ICT Systems Manager at Ashley Junior School, discovered Juniper’s website services.
The school considered several other companies but found them to be more expensive, overly complex, and less user-friendly. Ultimately, Ashley Junior School chose Juniper because of its competitive pricing and straightforward, accessible solutions, aiming to achieve a stable website that was easy to manage.
Paul describes how he chose Juniper:
“I looked at several other providers to find out who was offering what service and at what cost, but they were much more expensive. The other providers wanted to build a completely bespoke website from scratch, something we didn’t want. They seemed much more complicated and less user-friendly compared to Juniper, where the process is simple.”
Improved website analytics and user-experience
The new website, which was a Kaydon Red pre-design theme, has significantly improved the overall user experience, making navigation for administrators much faster and more intuitive. The ability to track most of the site's traffic has been particularly beneficial. Although more detailed end-user information from the statistics would be helpful in the future, the current tracking capabilities have already positively impacted key objectives and metrics.
As with any website development process, there were some basic issues – minor technical things early on. These were quickly resolved by Juniper's support Team, who Paul says have been “very approachable and very helpful indeed.”
Paul describes his experience with Juniper:
What can I say? Your team has been absolutely first-class in every aspect. I am so grateful and really impressed. The support I receive from Juniper is brilliant. From a genuine interest in making sure I am happy and everything is up and running to ensuring that I can look after the admin of our site myself, it’s been fantastic. Thank you so much.
Positive praise from the whole school community
Ashley Juniors' new school website has received positive feedback from the whole school community. Paul comments:
“Our staff and parents have been very pleased and impressed with the new site. They feel it is much easier to use and navigate, and the overall look is so much better.”
Sharing their success with other schools
Paul has already endorsed Juniper to two other schools, highlighting the success of their website project at Ashley Junior School. The new website has improved the school's online presence and relieved staff from dealing with website issues, allowing them to focus on other important tasks. Paul comments:
“I have already given glowing recommendations to two other schools who contacted me to see who I would recommend for their new websites. Juniper has been amazing right from the start of this process. I am so pleased to be with Juniper for our website, which is now such an important part of our school life. Thank you, each and every one of you.”
