“consolidation and consistency across our school”
Peter Henderson, Principal, Namoi Valley Christian School
Namoi Valley Christian School is a very small regional school. Rebuilding everything from the ground up, with our usual processes and deep research, wasn’t within scope. Everything had to be scaled down.
As soon as I met the team, it was clear they cared deeply. Real salt-of-the-earth people. I wanted the way families experienced the school, in print and online, to reflect who they were, and who those people at the heart of it were.
We’d already done a small brand uplift for them: some improved visuals, new photography, and new messaging. The website became a question of how far we could push the existing site under tight constraints. The bones of it were fine, the structure was decent, but the visuals and photography felt dated and a lot of the content was dry. The analytics were interesting too: they had strong organic traffic and people were reading, but the site wasn’t helping them take the next step. So we didn’t need to rebuild it. We needed to bring it into the same story as the prospectus and the brand work.
What I did was give them a day of my time. I said I’d push this website as hard as I could in a day and see where we got to. In that day I reskinned the whole thing. We kept the layouts close, tidied up the old messaging, pulled out anything out of date, cleaned up the hierarchy so it wasn’t so text-heavy, and sprinkled the new photography all the way through. It pulled everything together and made the whole thing feel far more immersive.
The before-and-after, old site to new, was stark. For a day’s work it was a real lift, and now their print, their website, and their enrolment touchpoints all feel like the same school.
The strategy was already clear, so the site didn’t need rebuilding. It needed a day spent bringing it into line with the prospectus and the brand, for a small fraction of the cost a rebuild would have run them.
A full website re-skin delivered in a single day.
A stark before-and-after, for a fraction of the cost of a rebuild.
Print, website, and enrolment touchpoints now feel like the same school.
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.
