Located in the Perth Hills across two campuses, Helena College is a progressive co-educational, independent school with a balanced focus on whole child development. Their junior school campus in Darlington caters to Kindergarten to year 5, while their senior school campus in Glen Forrest caters to years 6 to 12.
With a marketing team of just three working together across all online communications, an effective website was essential for Helena College. The upgrade to a more modern digital presence was transformative for both the school's marketing team and prospective families.
The challenge
Helena College isn’t located on a major road, so the school’s website is vitally important, acting as their billboard and main marketing tool. Despite this significance, the original Helena College website was outdated and challenging—to the point that staff members cheered when the new version was launched.
From a website visitor perspective, the site wasn’t particularly user-friendly or engaging. “In terms of what visitors to the website were seeing, it was very static. There was no movement,” says Mandy Cosser, Marketing and Community Relations Manager at Helena College. “Parents weren't actually able to interact with the website in any meaningful way other than clicking on an occasional link, and it definitely wasn't doing our school and our school community any justice.”
Behind the scenes, it was exceptionally difficult to manage and edit. The team needed to understand and write HTML despite having no training in it, and the platform was clunky and difficult to use. There were also limitations with embedding videos. "Pretty much anything we wanted to add that was outside of the ordinary, we'd have to purchase an additional add-on or plug-in," notes Mandy. "It was quite frustrating because, generally, this caused a delay."
On top of all this, they were struggling with their newsletters, sending parents a link to something they were creating outside of their website CMS. The templates they used offered little flexibility in terms of layout and adding photos and video.
Key goals
The Helena College team had some clear ideas about the basic features they needed in their new website and the kind of clean look and feel they wanted.
For the backend, it was paramount that the CMS was exceptionally easy to use and offered plenty of flexibility. They also wanted to have everything they needed already within the CMS without the need for additional plug-ins and payments.
From a front-facing perspective, the website needed clear and simple navigation for parents. It had to be engaging and provide the kind of information that prospective parents are looking for with clarity.
But most importantly of all, the website needed to be equally good across desktop and mobile.
“It needed to be mobile responsive because that is where parents are looking,” explains Mandy. “They'll be sitting having a cup of coffee in a cafe and Googling on the phone, and we want them to be able to see the website and read it just as easily as they would sitting behind their desk at work.”
“Prospective families are now the generation that grew up in a digital age and go online first for information. Research has shown that most parents will do a lot of research online before even coming on a school tour. Quite often, the first interaction a prospective family has with our school is through our website.”
Choosing Digistorm
When Mandy Cosser joined Helena College as Marketing and Community Relations Manager, she’d already worked with Digistorm at three different schools. Mandy’s decision to turn to Digistorm again stemmed from many reasons, but first and foremost, she likes choosing a company that specialises in the school industry.
“Schools are not your typical business-to-consumer or business-to-business kind of model,” shares Mandy. “So it was really important that we worked with somebody that understood the way schools work and the things that are important to marketing a school.”
Mandy also knew from experience that the customer service and responsiveness with Digistorm were high. “That makes the whole process easy, especially as a small team. Having someone at the other end of the phone or in a Zoom call just makes it a lot easier for us,” says Mandy.
The Helena College team also liked Digistorm’s new templated website options. Mandy found that there were quite a few to choose from and “it made it a lot faster to build the website because there was a structure in place. The design suited what we were looking to do and it was very, very easy.”
