British International School, Phuket (also known as BISP) is an English-medium independent school with a 44-acre campus on the stunning rainforested island of Phuket, Thailand.
British International School, Phuket has over 890 students (from 2 to 18 years old) from more than 55 countries, centring its curriculum around high-performance sports and creative arts.
Our challenge was to create a modern and intuitive online experience for parents of prospective students while making the website a key destination for existing parents, students and teachers.
To kick off the project, we asked BISP what makes parents choose an independent school in Asia, rather than an independent school in the UK. Their responses were:
Our conclusion was that British International School, Phuket was a superior choice, and it was vital that we accurately portray their student happiness, staff knowledge and stunning campus location.
Aside from beautification of BISP’s new website, the redesign was a great opportunity to introduce more of their existing high-quality videos and photos, as well as rethink some of the content to complement the school’s website redesign.
It was a requirement that the site is built using WordPress, and because we’re a WordPress web design agency – that wasn’t a problem! Using WordPress allows BISP to easily manage nearly 200 pages, thousands of blog posts and even more images, making WordPress the platform of choice for a school website.
Without further ado, here’s the site:
The main reasons for the redesign were to move to a more professional and secure site. With this in mind, we designed the site to make a lasting impression for anyone visiting the new website.
BISP’s new homepage is made up several sections, which include the school’s key statistics, main pages that lead off to landing pages (see further down), video blocks, a quote from the headmaster and a selection of blog posts from their immense news archive.
Lastly, each page ends with a call to action (CTA). These easy-access links are always visible to anyone who reaches the bottom of the page, to encourage visitors to contact the school or take direct action by scheduling a tour or applying to go to the school
Being a school website, we knew that we had to display pages in such a way to ensure that the menu dropdowns and footer didn’t have hundreds of links within them. We chose to guide users with the help of “landing pages”, which group content by topic. There are two stages to these, where the top level can be very broad, while the second level will list out all of the pages under that heading.
Each landing page block can be overridden to have a specific size and can have an image or video background.
Content is king, and even more so for an independent school like BISP. It was vital to ensure that the school has access to a wide range of formatting options, including different headings, tables, quotes, lists, statistics, charts and buttons. These are shown in a sample page below:
With thousands of existing blog posts and a healthy publishing schedule, BISP needed to step up their blog post layout. Aside from the cleaner and more focused content layout, we added social sharing options, newsletter signup, previous and next posts, and related posts based on the category that the post is in.
Being an international school, it was vital that contact information was readily available to anyone wanting to find out where exactly the school is based and how to contact them. The enquiry page is laid out to display various methods of contact, including links to the registration of interest form, schedule a tour form and an application form.
Further to this, the page has a fully interactive Google map, and a “taxi card”, which can be easily viewed on any device and printed; showing the school’s location on a map, alongside the full address in English and Thai.
Mobile certainly wasn’t missed. Every page designed on a desktop was accompanied by a mobile design. With thorough planning and designs, it was only natural that the website works flawlessly on mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop screens.
Through our successful relationship, we continue to help British International School, Phuket to improve their online presence. We have undertaken many changes to the site based on staff and visitor feedback in order to make the website adapted to the needs of its target audience. Our changes will be periodically updated here, but can also be found on the British International School, Phuket website.
Speak to our independent school web design experts today. Call us on (+44) 01258 917300 or fill out the form and a Parrot Creative representative will call you back.