A WordPress Network for Schools

Didgeroo and Haime & Butler worked together to build a set of new websites for one of England’s leading schools – Reigate Grammar.

Reigate Grammar had been locked into an expensive and restrictive website package with the popular http://www.schoolwebsite.co.uk service. “School Website” is very popular with independent schools however it is built on their proprietary closed-source technology called Fluency CMS.

By contrast, our solution is built on the powerful and very flexible Wordpress framework – the worlds most popular CMS used by 50% of the entire World Wide Web. WordPress is an open-source solution which means the code we have built for Reigate Grammar is owed by Reigate Grammar.

One of the key requirements for this project was to unify branding across all websites operated by the school. To enable this, we implemented a WordPress Network. A WP Network is single WordPress installation with a shared theme hosting multiple website. Some of the advantages of a WP Network include:

• Easier to managed mulitple sites via a single login and dashboard, while still allowing separate admins and dashboards for each individual site within the WP Network.
• Only one WordPress install (and plugins) to update and maintain
• Bug fixes and new features can be rolled out to all sites simultaneously

Other features include:

• A XML Calendar import from iSAMS
• Webcal Subscriptions
• Stripe payment integration
• A modular templating system allowing design components to be repeated anywhere on each page.
• A mobile-first design approach, design for 320px viewport then progressively enhancing as the viewport increases.

Project Details

• Client: Haime & Butler
• Services:  Consultation, Build, Hosting & Support
• Technologies: Wordpress Network, HTML5/CSS3, Javascript, RWD