- Ruth
Sustainability in Education
For: Noosa Pengari Steiner School
In mid 2010 Matt decided that he couldn't allow his kids' school to keep struggling with an inadequate online presence. The website had such crippling usability issues, that it was seriously impacting public perception.
In our experience, many school websites are poorly designed. A common reason is that they're often produced by well-meaning volunteers who, even if they have professional skills, donate their time to get the site up and running. This scenario frequently backfires for everyone involved: the web developer ends up rushing the job and the school ends up dissatisfied with the end product.
PunkLogic’s Approach
Our approach was to donate about 50% of the project time as an investment in building expertise in the education sector. The result seems to have worked for everyone.
Why would we do this?
PunkLogic considers the school as this region's benchmark for environmental sustainability - and that's something we're all passionate about. Recent buildings added to the site are great examples of their policy. Read this article for more information.
The Result
We’ve produced a professional, easy to use website with a streamlined publishing process. The hard working school administrators can now post timely information and news, such as parent talks and updates, directly to the blog rather than sending multiple emails with attachments. This way, the information can be shared more easily and referenced again and again.
Regular updates via the blogging component also improve the site’s search performance for ancillary terms making both the site and the information in it, easier for people to find.
One of the other nice features is the iCal feed and calendar sync to keep parents easily updated. We'd love to hear from some of the parents about what they think of the new site.