The MidCoast website was the first big project after the brand strategy and a small visual uplift, and that order was deliberate. A website is one of the biggest investments a school makes in the look and feel of its brand, and if the brand underneath is thin or has holes in it, you end up making things up during the build. We’d rather get the brand, the broader brand world, right first, and then tackle the website. You get a better result, and a more focused one: the moodboards, the inspiration, and the UI choices all have something true to draw on.
The site was built on WordPress, and it was our first build of a fully custom backend with a custom block builder. The whole design is reduced to its fundamental components, and those components can be added, edited, and adjusted visually in the backend, with variants for different uses. For the school’s team it’s simple to manage. On performance you get both: a completely custom, lean, fast WordPress site, with the editability of a visual builder. That approach has since become instrumental in how we build WordPress sites.
And it’s still WordPress, which matters. Development stays simple, which keeps costs down across the long life of a school website. There’s no vendor lock-in: any half-decent web agency in the world is comfortable in WordPress, so what we build can live a long time without anyone feeling stuck. That’s an important value of Bolsta’s.
The UX brief was simple pathways through the site, nothing too flashy, because it’s not a flashy school, and they’d say that themselves. What carries the site is the content. The video and photography we’d made across the years with MidCoast came to life on it, and we featured that media heavily while keeping the blocks and componentry reserved. The aim was a refined simplicity: not the basic kind you could throw together from a template in a day, but something intentional, with an almost humility to it. It’s deliberately not a site full of motion and wow moments. It honours the MidCoast personality.
Brand world first, website second. When the website draws on something true, simplicity stops being a compromise and becomes the point.
A fully custom, fast WordPress site on a custom block library the school's team can edit visually.
No vendor lock-in: any agency can work on it, so the site is built to live a long life.
The first build of the custom design system approach that now underpins Bolsta's websites.
We rewrote CEN’s entire services canon and re-architected their website from the school’s point of view, without rebuilding it, turning eleven ungrouped services into five clear categories and the generic pages into role-based guides.
For the launch we did some participatory design: gave the kids disposable cameras to photograph the values in action, then built those photos back into the brand.
