Lathallan needed a website that ensured prospective parents and students alike could find everything they needed to reassure them about the academic and social aspects of their independent school
Project Description
Lathallan School is a prestigious independent school, set inside a Scottish castle on the dramatic Aberdeenshire coast.
It is a place in which challenge, industriousness and maximising individual potential are pivotal in pupils’ educational development.
The Brief
Lathallan needed a website that ensured prospective parents and students alike could find everything they needed to reassure them about the academic and social aspects of their independent school. The school needed to be transparent, with good solid information for the parents and a strong visual element for the prospective students based on the way the different generations access information online.
We worked closely with the team at Lathallan School to ensure that we covered every detail of the school, in a structure that was easy to follow and flowed perfectly. The site also needed a customer portal, somewhere that parents could log in to keep current on events at the school.
Deliverables
Web Design and Development – Lathallan School needed a very visually strong website with a detailed UX design to incorporate all their information and deliver it in a free-flowing format. We also needed to develop their parent portal.
Digital Marketing and SEO – To ensure that prospective students and their parents could find the site, we worked on the keywords and build content around to drive them to the page.
Secure Managed Web Hosting – To ensure the new site ran as quickly as possible Lathallan School took up our hosting product. With our daily backups and sterling customer service, they never need to worry about losing business from their site going down.
Digital Consultancy – Social media was a key for Lathallan, but we worked with them to find the best solution for their particular customers. Facebook for the parents, Insta for the students, splitting the demographic.
Video Production and YouTube Strategy – With great visual representation, Lathallan needed a way to properly display their videos on the site as well as help upgrading their YouTube SEO to give a better chance of the school being found online.
Our Solution
Showcasing the multitude of elements of a beautiful independent school like Lathallan was a challenge. There are a couple of threads to this type of site. Firstly, you have to instil trust. You can do this by displaying the academic achievements, the social achievements and ensure that parents feel that this is not just an outstanding education establishment, but a place where their children will be happy, thrive and grow.
Secondly, you have to display this in-depth information in clever ways as you are appealing to two very diverse demographics. With the strong video content, the prospective pupils get to see and hear how fun, safe and diverse the whole experience could be. With content from former pupils, videos focussing on sporting achievements and the outstanding location, you are building on the child’s desire to go there.
The flipside of this is appealing to the parents. While they will love the video content, they need to know more, the real details of how good the school will be for their kids, how safe and, with a price attached, if they are going to get value for their money.
We developed a large, easy-to-navigate sitemap to cover almost every detail of the school, from achievements to staff, to academic excellence. Lathallan also asked us to incorporate a Parent Portal so that parents had a direct log in which can keep them informed of happenings and changes at the school without having to rely on social media.
The site had to be a blend of formal and informal, fun and serious, visual and text-heavy, but with a lot of hard work and great collaboration, we feel that we nailed the brief and Lathallan have the perfect site to showcase their incredible school.
To let Ossian Media analyse your business needs or existing site and see how we can make your site work for you, get in touch today and we can start discussing your digital needs.
