Hutt Valley High School Website
Over the years mhdesign has built quite a few websites for schools. In this time the needs of school websites have changed from small sites with basic hand-coded html pages to much larger Content Management System (CMS) equipped information portals.
Hutt Valley High School (HVHS) is one of the largest high schools in the Wellington metropolitan area. As well as Year 9 to Year 13 Students from the local Lower Hutt area, it caters for International Exchange Students from all over the world. This meant that its website had to be clearly laid out, with content arranged in a logical manner. It should also include a search facility and be easy to find online. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case.
The content management system that was in use was old, with limited functionality. It was difficult to work with, meaning that it was hard for site administrators to update content and even harder to style it to look as you wanted. Not only that, over the years the navigation system had become very complex, with many layers of menus, and the result was that information was difficult to find, even for the site admins, and pages were often out of date.
We approached HVHS with a visual design proposal, but it was quickly decided that it would be much simpler to redevelop the site on a more modern CMS. In this instance Wordpress was the obvious choice. We prepared a custom-built theme based on the HVHS visual brand cues and supported HVHS staff while they transferred content to the new website and updated the information. During the process we were able to modify the page design for different types of page content, and add different features and extensions from Wordpress’ vast library of plugins.
The end result is a modern, easy to use website that can be easily updated and maintained on a regular basis.