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.
Ack! Hacked!
In our review, we pointed out some technical improvements they could make to improve performance, and we discovered during this process that their website also had been hacked and included malware. We were able to remove the malware for them and install some enhanced security with the WordFence plugin.
Cleaning up the backend and improving the sitemap
We cleaned up their sitemap and removed old and unused pages. We created redirects for pages that were changed or removed. We also added custom SEO meta descriptions to all the pages.
New school website design and color palette
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.
The new website received an A+ shout out on the Upgrade School Marketing podcast:
Overall, the implementation of our recommended improvements for performance, back end organization and design have made a big difference for the Parker School website. Check it out!
Interested in a complete website review of your school website?