Case study · Education
Plymouth College. A school with history, rebuilt for the next intake.
The Plymouth College website serves an independent day and boarding school in Britain’s Ocean City, one educating pupils since 1877 and producing Olympians along the way. Working with the school’s marketing team, I rebuilt the website on WordPress around their brand, with a home page that moves.
- Client
- Plymouth College plymouthcollege.com
- Sector
- Independent day and boarding school, ages 3 to 18
- Services
- WordPress, web design, SEO
- Working with
- The school’s in-house marketing team
Plymouth College has a lot to say and many people to say it to. A prep school from age three, a senior school and sixth form, boarding houses for pupils from all over the world, and a performance sport programme that has sent more than two hundred pupils onto the world stage. Prospective parents, current families, international pupils and alumni all arrive with different questions.
The marketing team knew the brand and had the assets: photography, copy, the visual identity. What they needed was a website that did them justice, that they could run themselves, and that presented a complex offer as one confident story. My job was the structure, the build and the search.
The approach.
Their brand, their assets, a structure built around the parent’s journey, and a WordPress build the team owns.
Structure the school the way a parent thinks about it.
Prep, Senior, Boarding and Performance Sport each became a clear section with its own journey through curriculum, co-curricular life and admissions, so a parent of a three-year-old and the parent of a sixth-form swimmer both find their path from the first screen. The history, the sport and the coastal location became the proof that runs through every section.
- Four clear sections: Prep, Senior, Boarding, Sport
- Admissions reachable from every page
- Keyword map for the searches parents make
A home page that moves, built with GSAP.
The team wanted a home page with real presence. The hero and section reveals were built with GSAP, the animation library used on the most polished sites on the web, so the headline, imagery and sections choreograph as the visitor scrolls. It is restrained, fast and respects visitors who prefer reduced motion, which is what separates considered animation from decoration.
- GSAP scroll-driven reveals on the home page
- Performance kept in check despite the motion
- Reduced-motion preferences honoured
A WordPress build the marketing team can run.
A custom WordPress theme built around the school’s brand guidelines, with the content types a school needs: news, events, pages for each school and sport, and the admissions journey. The marketing team update it themselves, add news and events, and keep every page on brand without touching code.
- Custom theme from the school’s brand and assets
- Content types for news, events and admissions
- SEO foundations: titles, structured data, sitemaps, redirects
What was delivered.
- CollaborationWorked directly with the marketing team, who supplied branding, photography and copy, to turn their assets into a finished site.
- StructureA sitemap organised around Prep, Senior, Boarding and Performance Sport, with admissions reachable from everywhere.
- WordPress buildA custom theme on the school’s brand, with content types for news, events, school sections and sport programmes.
- GSAP home pageScroll-driven animation on the home page, built for presence without sacrificing speed or accessibility.
- Responsive designEvery section designed for the phone in a parent’s hand as well as the desktop in the school office.
- Editing handoverThe team publish news, events and page changes themselves.
- SEOPage structure, titles, descriptions, structured data and technical foundations for the searches parents make.
- MigrationExisting content and addresses carried across with redirects so nothing was lost.
- PerformanceImages sized per device, caching configured and Core Web Vitals checked before launch.
The result.
A website that matches the school.
A site with the presence of a school that has produced Olympians, organised so that every kind of visitor finds their path, and animated with enough confidence to feel modern without slowing anyone down.
The marketing team run the Plymouth College website day to day, as other Plymouth businesses I work with do, and the structure and search foundations are in place for the admissions seasons to come. Their brand, done justice.
How I build on WordPressServices used on this project.
Web Design
Bespoke, responsive websites designed around your customers and what you want them to do.
Learn more about web designA website for your school or organisation?
Tell me who the site has to speak to and what you already have in place. I’ll suggest a structure and what the build would involve.
- 1You send a few lines.What the business does and what the website needs to do.
- 2I reply, personally.Usually the same day, with questions and a time for a call.
- 3You get a written proposal.Scope, stages and price for exactly that. No obligation, no hard sell.
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