Bearwood College

www.bearwoodcollege.co.uk

About Bearwood College

Bearwood College is an independent school based in Wokingham in Berkshire, offering education for 11 to 18 year olds in their 250 acre site. The stunning Manor House and excellent facilities make Bearwood College one of the premier colleges in the country.

Requirements

Bearwood College needed to refresh an old and dated website in order to improve the look and feel and add new features. The goals of the new site were:

• Increase visibility of the facility hire services
• Provide parents with an area to access private information about the school and events
• Meet their accessibility obligations
• Have the facility to quickly and easily update content on the website
• Notify prospective parents about upcoming events, open days and news about the College.
• Increase traffic to the site
• Increase applications to the college

The Solution

Built using web standards and ASP.NET, we created a refreshed, clean styled website that matched with their existing brochure look and feel. The website uses a liquid layout, allowing the content to fill the browser window regardless of screen size. Accessibility was addressed by creating an accessible version of the site that exceed priority level 2 priority of the W3C accessibility guidelines – a level which far exceeds the legal obligations.
Features of the new Bearwood College website include:

• Latest news with RSS feed
• Private parental area
• Fully manageable content through simple management software
• Search engine optimisation
• Analysis of content and restructure of website to allow for better access to deeper information
• Focus on secondary school, nursery and facility hire

The Results

Launched in May 2006, the website has been enjoying double the visits and four times the hits on the site. Through restructuring the site, reassessing the company goals and using good web design techniques, we have managed to increase traffic visiting the site and improved traffic throughout the site. We have doubled the number of visitors who are, on average, clicking on double the amount of pages.
The site appears at the top of Google for search terms such as “Facility hire Berkshire” and “Children’s Nursery Berkshire”.