St Albans Girls' School

/11

St Albans Girls school is my secondary school. While I was studying there, I wrote to them asking whether they would consider a redesign of their website, which they agreed to. The old website was ‘not fit for purpose’ as one parent noted on the current website questionnaire feedback form which was sent to all parents. I started this project in October 2007, and it launched in Spring 2008.

Room for Improvement

Some of the aspects of the website that the Headmistress, Mrs Murrell, was eager to improve was the site’s accessibility (to comply with the disability act), usability (to make it intuitive for non-Internet-savvy users) and also the image that the site represented of the school. (At the end of the project, I produced an accessibility report and manual for the website editors).

Design

I presented the school governors with 20 different designs to choose from. Some might say this was perhaps too many, but the governors were not sure exactly how they wanted the website to look, so a range of rough ideas was, in this case, more ideal than a few.

Construction

In December, I started making the website on the CMS (content management system) Drupal.

The features include:

• a 360 degree panoramic view of the entrance (with hopefully more to follow)
• an interactive map of the building
• the photo in the header is randomly selected from a library of photos, showing different aspects of the school
• there is a search box to help the user find the content they need