The Charlotte Jewish Day School came to us to refresh their website. Their former website was an out-of-date WordPress theme that could no longer be updated, and the back end of their website had become unwieldy with hundreds of pages and plugins. We were excited to help them create a more professional online presence.
Content and Messaging
CJDS had some nice photography which was not being well-utilized on their former site. We were able to migrate and access all the content from their old website and select and edit some of their best photography for different pages on the website.
CJDS collaborated with Edit Barry of E&A Co for messaging and content writing, allowing them to hone in on their key points of differentiation and communicate the school’s attributes clearly.
Testimonial Videos
We dive into the content that is available from our clients. The client had some nice parent testimonial videos. We watched these videos and pulled out some key words and made a compelling slider for the home page.
Improving and Enhancing Forms
CJDS sells spirit items, as well as Challah, Hamantashen and Club Registrations through their website. They were using a combination of Woo Commerce and Gravity Forms. Since they were not selling a lot of items, and people do not purchase from multiple categories at once, we were able to remove Woo Commerce and create a great-looking form for the Spirit Store items, as well as clean up the user experience for purchasing other items and after school club registrations. We connected these forms to a Stripe account, making it seamless for the user and easy for CJDS to manage.
GiveWP for Fundraisers and Donations
CJDS purchased a GiveWP bundle, which allowed us to connect their donation form to Stripe and easily add featured such as fee recovery, fund designations and tributes. It will be easy for them to create a new form for Giving Tuesday and other special fundraising events.
Cleaning Up The Back End and Optimizing For Performance
We encounter a lot of old websites that have, over time, become very messy on the back end, with pages out of order, not in use and extraneous. We cleaned up the page structured for CJDS and created redirects for pages no longer needed. The navigation is streamlined across the site, which makes it easier to use on both the front and back end.
Moving to great hosting at Kinsta, being selective about using well-developed plugins, and optimizing images, we were able to create a dramatic improvement in performance for CJDS.
New Logo and Saving Money and Time By Combining Websites
CJDS sponsors an organization called Joined In Education, which was hosted on a separate WordPress installation, but which only had a few pages. We created a section within the CJDS website with a separate header and footer for Joined in Education (JIE). This allows CJDS to manage this small amount of content from their main website, streamlining their process and linking the two organizations. We forwarded the old joinedineducation.org domain to the new section of the website.
New Logo
The former JIE website used a clip-art logo that needed an upgrade. We developed a logo for JIE that better connected it to the school logo, and which is an SVG vector file that looks crisp and professional.
Happy Client!
CJDS loves their new website. They find it easy to edit and to add new content. Their staff, board and community are thrilled with the new professional look that shows off all the things they love about their school.