St Bart’s School
SCHOOL WEBSITE DESIGN, BRANDING AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
St Bart’s is a high-achieving secondary school in Newbury, Berkshire, with a strong academic reputation and an active, engaged community of parents, students and alumni. When they came to us, their website told a different story.
“It’s brilliant working with Lemongrass Media. They created a fantastic website for our school and I would highly recommend their web services. The Lemongrass Media team are professional, efficient, knowledgeable and approachable, always willing to make suggestions and help with projects. Nothing is too much trouble and they deliver this top service with a smile and a sense of humour. What more could you ask for!”
The Challenge
The site had grown in an unplanned way over many years. Pages had accumulated without a clear structure, menus were overflowing and in some cases duplicating content that already existed elsewhere. Nobody quite knew where things should live and finding information as a visitor was harder than it should have been.
The bigger frustration was felt internally. Laura, the school’s marketing manager, was producing good content consistently.
She knew what the site needed. But the existing theme was so limited in what it would allow that basic things like varying image sizes and galleries were off the table. She was constantly working around its constraints rather than with them. The platform was the problem, not the person.
Beyond the content management issues, the school had outgrown its brand. The logo and house logos needed to evolve and there was no cohesive visual identity tying everything together.
The Solution
We started with a thorough audit of the existing site, mapping every page, identifying duplicates and building a new content structure from scratch before any design work began. Getting that right at the start was the priority.
The new site gave Laura the flexibility she needed. Images, galleries and layout options that had previously been off limits became straightforward. The content management experience was rebuilt around how the marketing team actually worked rather than around the limitations of a theme.
We created dedicated interactive pages to showcase the school’s history and alumni programme, with timelines, biographies and photography given the space they deserved. Subject pages were restructured using tabs so that key stage information from KS3 through GCSE and Post-16 could sit on a single page rather than being split across multiple locations.
An interactive aerial map was built to let prospective parents and students explore the school site and its facilities before visiting in person.
A live Google Calendar integration meant the events and calendar pages would update automatically without any manual input from the team.
Two additions made a particular difference operationally. A digital student information form, sent to all incoming Year 7 pupils before they join, replaced a paper-based process that had previously required significant admin time to collect and process. Parents and pupils complete it online and the school receives everything it needs in one place.
A newsletter system was integrated directly with the website’s news feed, allowing the school to send regular updates to both parents and alumni automatically. The hours previously spent laying out newsletters in MS Publisher disappeared entirely.
The rebrand ran in parallel. Working through several rounds of discussion on fonts, colours, layouts and graphics, we developed a new school logo and a full set of house logos. Brand guidelines were produced and the new identity is now used consistently across the school’s materials and signage.
The Result
Since launch, the site has recorded over 400,000 sessions, with 159,000 coming through organic search, a strong indicator that the new structure and content are being found and indexed effectively. Direct traffic accounts for 240,000 sessions, reflecting strong brand recognition and regular returning visits from the school community.
The homepage is the clear primary entry point, with term dates, the calendar and staff information among the most visited pages, exactly the content parents and students are looking for. Traffic has remained consistent since launch.
Internally, the impact has been just as significant. Laura can now manage the site properly without being constrained by the platform. Admin staff have reclaimed hours previously spent processing paper-based student information. Newsletter production, once a manual and time-consuming task, now runs as part of the website’s natural workflow.
St Bart’s is a good example of what happens when a school’s digital presence finally catches up with the quality of the school itself. The technology was holding people back. Once that was removed, the content, the brand and the community could all be presented properly.
We continue to support St Bart’s as their site grows and evolves.
If your school website is limiting what your team can do rather than enabling it, take a look at our school website design services or get in touch for an honest conversation about what is possible.
