Parker School

The Parker School is a progressive private school near Albany, New York. They have a beautiful outdoor campus and an active community. The school hired Design TLC to review their website and make some recommendations. They had built the site themselves and added a lot of great content, but it scored low on performance tests, and they wanted some suggestions on how to make it better.

The redesigned Parker School website is now faster, more secure, and visually consistent. The new website received an A+ shout out on the Upgrade School Marketing podcast:

Objective

The Parker School reached out to Design TLC to assess and improve their existing website. While the school had done a great job building out content themselves, the site was scoring poorly on performance tests and lacked design consistency. The school wanted help with optimizing the website’s speed and structure, improving its design, and receiving guidance on next steps for technical and strategic enhancements.

Our mission was to:

Assess overall website performance and design
Identify technical issues, including performance and security vulnerabilities
Recommend improvements for a more consistent and professional design
Organize and optimize existing content and navigation
Support internal team with tools and training for ongoing content management

Approach

Our first step was a thorough audit of the website, where we discovered not only performance bottlenecks but also malware that had compromised site security. We promptly removed the malware and implemented WordFence for added protection. We then cleaned up the back end of the site by removing outdated content, fixing broken links, and creating appropriate redirects.

We also made some design recommendations, which turned into a conversation among their stakeholders that led to a new color palette and the development and implementation of a new website design. We were thrilled to work with such an engaged team and to see the significant improvement to the look and feel of the website. One thing we pointed out was the need for a consistent design throughout the website. Their old site had different fonts, colors and layouts on different pages of the website, which is improved on the new site by using templates that can be easily applied to create a consistent format throughout the site.

After creating the custom theme and templates, we went over every page on the site and organized the existing content to fit into the new template. We showed the client how to edit the content and images, which was very important, as many of their images did not have relevant titles or alt text, and were not optimized, which negatively impacted the website performance.

Outcome

The redesigned Parker School website is now faster, more secure, and significantly more user-friendly, thanks to a comprehensive overhaul of both design and functionality. The removal of malware and implementation of improved security protocols helped restore confidence in the site’s safety for both users and administrators. With a new color palette, cohesive typography, and consistent page templates, the website now accurately reflects the school’s progressive identity and welcoming community. Improved site architecture and content organization allow visitors to easily find information, while enhanced SEO strategies and optimized images boost the site’s visibility and performance. The staff now has a clear system for managing content updates, which means the website can grow and evolve as the school does.

Key results include: