Admissions focused website for one of Berkshire’s most prestigious private girls schools.

Queen Anne’s School is an independent boarding and day school for girls, with over 450 pupils, aged 11 to 18 years. It educates young women to become informed, bold, resourceful and ethical global citizens. The environment at Queen Anne’s fosters a love of learning, the habits of an intellectual life, the character, the moral strength and qualities for leadership to shape a changing world.

It was this environment that Queen Anne’s felt was not fully represented by their current website. Prospective parents were getting to the site but a confusing sitemap and page structure, wrapped in a fairly out-dated and predictable look-and-feel was causing them to lose interest. The new website needed to solve these user journey issues, and the new design needed to tell the story of Queen Anne’s through an established application of the brand.

We worked with Queen Anne’s to explore their key user personas and what we expected them to do on the site. As a private school within a fairly saturated market, we executed an in-depth competitor analysis to ascertain where we could really make Queen Anne’s stand out from the crowd.

Once we had established the look and feel – a drastically improved structure, new font, clear photography style and a more succinct headline approach – we continued our work on the functional side of the website. This involved ensuring all the current functionality – various contact forms, payment systems, virtual tour capabilities and school calendars to name but a few – were successfully integrated into the website, along with new WordPress CMS functionality and a look at streamlining the process of working with their external providers, Schoolbase.

What resulted was a modernised and structurally-improved website with all the core functionality retained and an infinitely smoother CMS experience for all involved.