Santa Fe Prep choose Moore Consulting for new website design
Monday, August 27, 2007
It’s been up for a little while now, but I thought it was time for a story about the Santa Fe Prep website, which Moore Consulting planned and built.
The Challenge
Santa Fe Prep - the town’s leading independent high school - needed a new website to replace the old, text-heavy and difficult to maintain presence they already had.
It was also unclear what the goals and audiences for the site were, and there was concern that it didn’t project a professional and welcoming message.
Our approach was first to gather the main stakeholders in the site from across the school community - including parents - and work out the key audience groups and objectives for the site at a workshop.
Getting to know the audience
To explore the needs of the different audiences more fully, we developed personas of a particular imagined representative of the main groups, based on what we knew about them.
This revealed some great detail about what the site should contain. For example, it was clear that new parents’ requirements were very different from those whose children were already at the school.
It also showed that prospective students were looking for different sorts of information to their parents, when considering whether to apply to Prep.
The Planning and Building
With this detailed set of requirements, we could plan a site that was clearly aimed at users.
One key requirement was keeping the school community up to date with news and events, so we built the site using an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), so news stories (including very time-sensitive information such as snow delays) could be added to the site quickly.
We also installed a calendar system that was simple and flexible, separating athletic events from general school events for ease of use.
E-mail newsletter
Another way to keep everyone informed was a graphically-rich email newsletter - a great improvement over the costly and slow paper-based approach Prep had previously been using.
We planned and designed an attractive template, and set up the system using the MyEmma product to ensure that once people within the school were comfortable, they could create and send out each newsletter themselves.
The result
New content is still being added to the site, but the response to the new presence has been great, from parents, alums and even prospective teachers.