New School Website - Comments Please :)

[jamesfed]

Hi all,

 

For the past week I've been working on and off to revamp the current school website - Langtree School home into a new uberly easy to update CMS (WordPress in this case) based site.

 

Currently the product of that work is here - Langtree School: Home

 

There’s still a few things to do (loads of pages that just look wrong or don't have links to downloads) but I'd appreciate any comments people have to say.

 

Don't worry if anything looks out of date and yes for the large part the site looks the same on the outside but in this case that was the brief

 

P.S. Please don't comment on the selection of WordPress - we opted for it solely because Joomla! and other CMSs were deemed to complicated to be used in the style that we want.

[EduTech]

First Impressions, Very well done! Site looks clean and neat

 

I'll have a look through the pages when i get home and see if i find any problems and i'll let you know.

 

James.

[jamesfed]

First Impressions, Very well done! Site looks clean and neat

 

I'll have a look through the pages when i get home and see if i find any problems and i'll let you know.

 

James.

 

Cheers Another one of the aims was to 'brighten it up' and (with no intention of causing offense) to not give anyone a fit when scrolling.

 

There will be tones of broken/mis redirected links on it at the moment but so long as you stick to the top and side nav menus it should be fine.

[dezt]

not give anyone a fit when scrolling.

 

That was the first thing that hit me when I looked at your old site, couldn't look at it for more than a couple of seconds without my eyes hurting. I like the look of your new site, does look very neat.

[LosOjos]

looking good, the old site looks a little like one of those place-holder search engines, but your new site definitly seems 'friendlier'

[speckytecky]

Looks great to me. I'm just about to post a link up to my first effort! I'm interested to see you are carrying an advert to Heart - did they approach you or was it the schools idea. A pretty shrewd move particularly as they seem to be the firstish place people visit nowadays for school closure lists etc!

[jamesfed]

Looks great to me. I'm just about to post a link up to my first effort! I'm interested to see you are carrying an advert to Heart - did they approach you or was it the schools idea. A pretty shrewd move particularly as they seem to be the firstish place people visit nowadays for school closure lists etc!

 

Great stuff!

They certinly do seem to be the one for school closures these days.

As far as how we got in contact with them all I know is one day a few of their team appeared with heart cookies and mugs (of which I got both ) and dished them out to the staff.

[tsimons]

First off -

Its very nice, easy on the eyes (unlike your old one)

 

Im not too sure about the headbanner though, the purple colour looks out of place with the nice blue background.

 

Other than that, it looks nice, well done!

[jamesfed]

First off -

Its very nice, easy on the eyes (unlike your old one)

 

Im not too sure about the headbanner though, the purple colour looks out of place with the nice blue background.

 

Other than that, it looks nice, well done!

 

Cheers Tom

 

I think were looking at revamping most of the content on the site and I'd imagine the header would be involved in that, luckely because its all WordPress based we can change the layout and not affect any of the content.

[gibbo_ap]

the rss icon in the corner overlaps i dont know if this was the intent but i think a smaller one would work better.

 

i agree with the title banner due to the colour and that it looks streched (slightly blury) but as you have said this will be getting done.

 

design wise i would try a white to blue gradiented bkg with the shine in the corner as the eyes will focus on the content more.

 

but all in all nice site!

[ICT_GUY]

looks good, The home page looks as though the School Information, Students, parents, headings and pictures ect should be links but they are not, Other than that well done indeed!

[jamesfed]

the rss icon in the corner overlaps i dont know if this was the intent but i think a smaller one would work better.

 

i agree with the title banner due to the colour and that it looks streched (slightly blury) but as you have said this will be getting done.

 

design wise i would try a white to blue gradiented bkg with the shine in the corner as the eyes will focus on the content more.

 

but all in all nice site!

 

Didn't notice the RSS feed - thanks.

 

Streched *halo* never....... (it is - still waiting for the origional photoshop image from the old websites designer).

 

Will have a look at the colour option you suggested, was trying to get some more yellow in there (blue and yellow are our colours) but just wouldn't look good.

[jamesfed]

looks good, The home page looks as though the School Information, Students, parents, headings and pictures ect should be links but they are not, Other than that well done indeed!

 

They will be once we get this site transfered over to the school domain, same applies to anything that looks like a link/download in the content area of the site.

 

The menu bar and the sidebar links work though

[pwds]

Changing the theme in Wordpress is extremely easy so tweaks to header etc. will have no effect on the content or site structure, nor even involve any downtime.

 

Simply develop the new theme, and apply when ready.

 

If you're not using WPMU (and can therefore test the new theme on a "development" blog) then it might be worth taking a dump of the SQL and directory contents into an XAMPP install so you can play around without affecting the live site.

 

Then you can simply copy the finished theme over to the directory on your live site and apply when you're ready.

 

As it will simply read the contents of the "WP-Themes" directory and all configuration is contained within the theme folder, you can simply copy it over without needing any database changes.

[jamesfed]

Changing the theme in Wordpress is extremely easy so tweaks to header etc. will have no effect on the content or site structure, nor even involve any downtime.

 

Simply develop the new theme, and apply when ready.

 

If you're not using WPMU (and can therefore test the new theme on a "development" blog) then it might be worth taking a dump of the SQL and directory contents into an XAMPP install so you can play around without affecting the live site.

 

Then you can simply copy the finished theme over to the directory on your live site and apply when you're ready.

 

As it will simply read the contents of the "WP-Themes" directory and all configuration is contained within the theme folder, you can simply copy it over without needing any database changes.

 

Thats our entire reason for selecting WordPress in a paragraph.

 

We're not using WPMU (however we did have a short go at it before we got Kaliedos) but again its a fantastic web application.

 

Most of the layout design was done in an application called Artisteer - it allows rapid protoyping and you can get some pretty impressive results - Artisteer Web Designer - Product Intro

 

Thanks for the suggestion of the testing site to - could imagine that being very useful.

Edited January 15, 2010 by jamesfed

[ICT_GUY]

They will be once we get this site transfered over to the school domain, same applies to anything that looks like a link/download in the content area of the site.

 

The menu bar and the sidebar links work though

 

Ahhhhhh

[ICT_GUY]

I love wordpress, we have quite a large site, no problems so far even on a very modest hosting budget (£60 per year). Back ups are a cinch too. Edited January 15, 2010 by ICT_GUY