Birchwood High School Story

Discover

Design and build of a 275 page website for Birchwood High School

Birchwood High School is a coeducational secondary school and sixth form with academy status in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire.

They came to Right Angle with a brief to redesign their website and create a vibrant, exciting online presence for the school, which was engaging, interactive and easy to navigate.

Design

Understanding and rationalising information

In order to rationalise all of the information, we divided everything into 4 main categories: High School, 6th Form, Parents and Staff. Each category then has it’s own mega-menu and subdivisions so that all main pages of the site can be accessed from the top menu and any secondary pages are located in the footer.

Fully responsive across all devices

With over 50% of people viewing websites on either mobile phones or tablets, it’s important to ensure that their user experience is optimised for each platform.

Right Angle created the overall look and styling of the new Birchwood website to work across all devices. We created custom design templates for all key types of web page, working closely with the in-house team at Birchwood to populate and deliver the project.

Brand rationalisation

We were provided with JPEG versions of the Birchwood logo, which we then vectorised, produced SVG files to ensure that wherever the brand is represented, it’s sharp and of optimum quality.

On the full-colour version of the current branding, the logo consists of a tree symbol with a brown trunk and green foliage together with the strapline – ‘your dreams, your future, our challenge’. For website usage, the colours would clash with certain images and the strapline wouldn’t work well at small sizes.

Our solution was to create a new black & white single colour version of the logo, moving the strapline so it sits prominently on the feature images in the slider and moving the ‘Birchwood High School’ text down to visually balance with the trunk of the tree.

Photographic retouching and optimisation

Photography is a key factor in the overall look and styling of your website. Unique images play an important role in helping differentiate you from your competition as well as supporting your brand. All images on your website should be optimised not only for size and load speed but also for contrast, clarity, sharpness and colour correction.

Deliver

A new interactive hub

Birchwood High School now has a vibrant, exciting new website which not only meets the brief of being engaging and easy to navigate, it’s also the interactive hub of all activities and communication between staff, parents and pupils.

So, if you’re looking for design advice, no matter where you are in your business journey, we can help. Get in touch.

If you would like to find out more about our work on the Birchwood High School project, just let us know.