Garden International School Website Revamp

Client: Garden International School
Platform: WordPress

Design trends in web design are constantly evolving, over time a website that used to bring in a steady string of enquiries can look tired and obsolete. In an ideal world, your school would opt for a complete redesign of their website, in the real world though, many international schools have tight marketing budgets. In Garden Rayong’s case the information on their website was on message, however, the look of the website was dated and needed revitalizing.

All WordPress sites have a set of files that determine the look and feel of the website without making changes to the underlying database that sores the information contained in the website. Changing a theme, in theory, should change the look of the website without altering it’s content.

A New Lease of Life

For Garden International School I was able to quickly and cost effectively modernize the look of their website. At the same time I added several new landing pages, and made calls to action buttons, such as book a tour, more prominent. Making it easier for potential parents to quickly and easily register their interest in applying to GIS.

Choosing the Right Theme

Garden wanted a theme that not only looked good but also supported video. The biggest challenge here was to create a video into that had the right balance of quality vs being small enough to load quickly. In addition to choosing a good looking theme, when selecting a new WordPress theme for your school, it is important to select a theme that is well-coded and fast loading. If you are replacing digital assets, such as images and PDF files, it is important to optimize them properly for quick loading. Large files and uncompressed assets can severely hamper a site’s load speed.

Testing Before Launch

Before switching themes it is vital that you test the changes beforehand in a development environment

Simply installing a new theme and then activating it over your school’s old website is a bad idea and you should back up and test a major change such as this in a development environment first.

Many WordPress sites are built using page builder plugins, and while page builders help non-technical content creators quickly create and customize page layouts, they often add hidden CSS and HTML markup that suddenly becomes visible when switching to a new theme. Unfortunately, if you have built your WordPress site using a page builder, you will most likely have to remove the markup page by page. In addition to this, overwriting the CSS file(s), which determine the layout of your website, can cause some unexpected behavior and layout problems.