Getting your new bespoke school website ready for launch

Discovery

Within 48 hours of your project being confirmed, you will receive a call from one of our project coordinators, who will be your dedicated main point of contact throughout the project. Your project coordinator will guide you through the process to help your new website be delivered on time and to budget.

This initial call will allow you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have and allow us to find out key information about your organisation such as who will be working on the project, who has final sign off on the designs and which domain names you’d like to use when your site goes live.

You will also be introduced to Basecamp, our project communication software. This will used to communicate with you, send design visuals and share information. Every message you get will also be sent your email account, so you will never miss an update and we’ll always confirm discussions had in phone calls on Basecamp so that everyone is kept up to date.

As part of the discovery phase, you will be asked to start thinking about your content and sitemap and advised how to start collating this for later in the project.

Design

Each of our bespoke website projects start with a design consultation between your team and one of our professional designers. We want to hear what makes your school special along with your ideas for your new design. We’ll find out more about your challenges with your existing website and what we can do to help you achieve your goals.

Your designer will recommend design elements they think would work brilliantly for your requirements, with the overall aim of creating a cohesive design brief. You will receive a copy of this brief to approve before they start to work on your designs.

Within 2-3 weeks you will get to see your first set of visuals - showing how your new website will look. The designs will be shared on an interactive link – so you can click through to see the homepage, inner page and any custom page designs you’ve commissioned. You’ll see how we incorporate your vision and values to create a design that is truly bespoke to you.

You and your team will then be able to share your feedback, which can be provided on Basecamp or via a telephone or a video chat. We want to know what you like, what you don’t and anything you feel needs tweaking or changing. It must be right, so we’ll work with you to refine the designs, going back and forth, until they are a true representation of your school, and you are completely happy with them.

When you’re happy, you will be asked to ‘sign off’ your designs in writing on Basecamp.

Your project coordinator will let you know timescales for the development stage and ask you to confirm when you will be ready to start sending across your new website content. If you are having a data transfer from your old website to the new one, we will confirm the elements you’d like to transfer and a date for the transfer to take place.

Development

Development is where we take your designs and transform them into a fully working website.

Behind the scenes our front-end development team will bring your website designs to life, adding transitions, animations and the tiny flourishes that improve the user experience and add that extra layer of polish!

Using the latest development best practice and accessibility requirements, your website will be fully responsive and built mobile first onto our innovative content management system.

At this stage we will also ask you to upload the content files to Basecamp for the pages we’ve agreed to add to your new website for you. You should also be finalising the rest of your content ready for you to add once you are given access to your new website.

If you are having a data transfer from your existing website, we will do this at the end of the development phase for you.

Content

Once your website has been built the content coordinator will style the pages with your content.

At this point you will then get to see your fully functioning website for the first time!

Your project coordinator will provide you with your development link, username and password. Once you’re logged in to the Content Management System (CMS) you will have access to our interactive help system and walk-through guides to help you upload your remaining content.

If you have remote training included within your project, then you will receive an invitation to attend a personal session hosted by our implementation specialists. Otherwise, the support team and your project coordinator will be on hand to help you with any questions and talk through how to use the CMS.

At this stage of the process, you will be invoiced for the final 50% of your order and your annual fee for hosting, maintenance and support. Now that your new website is hosted on our servers, you will be able to benefit from unlimited support, CMS updates, bug fixes and access to our customer exclusive content.

Once you have uploaded all your content you are ready to launch your new website.

Go Live

When you’re ready to launch your new website, your project coordinator will run a ‘go live’ check on your development link. We’ll analyse your website for any missing content as well as GDPR requirements such as cookie bar and privacy policy enablement and whether you have assigned a Data Protection Officer.

When everything is ready, your DNS settings will need to be updated to direct your existing domain to your new website. If we have purchased your domain or taken control of the domain registration panel for you, then we will make these changes on your behalf. If you manage your domain, the instructions are straightforward and often can be passed directly to your IT team to action.

Once the DNS changes have been made, your new website will start to go live! There is usually a propagation process of around 24 – 48 hours but you should never be without a website during this period – visitors to your domain will either see the old website or the new one, whilst the propagation takes place.

Once your website has fully propagated then you will have officially gone live. Your project coordinator will be in touch to let you know and congratulate you on your new website launch.

If you choose to share your launch on social media, be sure to tag us so we can celebrate with you by resharing your post to our audience of schools, trusts and teachers.

Post Live

Once your website has been live for a week or two, your Basecamp project will be closed down and you will receive a call from your dedicated account executive. They will be your main contact within e4education and will check in regularly to share information on website best practice, SEO and Ofsted compliance as well as answering any questions you may have.

You will also have unlimited access to our support team who are always on hand to answer any technical or CMS queries between 8am and 4.30pm, Monday to Friday.