The Scope
Bethink was hired to develop websites for both The Penn Manor School District and Penn Manor High School, with a focus on creating a theme that was in sync with the brand standards of the district, had accessibility in mind from the start, and took advantage of current best practices in WordPress development.
Penn Manor School District is one of the largest districts in Lancaster County, with an average student population of 5,550 that spans 113 rural square miles to the east of the Susquehanna River and encompasses five municipalities.
Innovations
Our goal was to create a modern, responsive theme for the district’s use that visually differentiated between the district and high school, but reflected that both websites were part of the same Penn Manor family.
Maximizing Edit Capabilities
This was a full-site-edit build, which expands what’s possible for Penn Manor’s team to manage on the front end.
Information Architecture Audit
We organized a massive amount of data from the school district and the high school – conduct policies, club and sports meetings, and so on – and files like paperwork, calendars, and media.
In order to minimize overwhelm and streamline information access, we conducted a traffic analysis and did research into peer websites to optimize the home page and navigation for ease. We also helped locate critical information that we could link out to rather than host directly, reducing the administrative load on the Penn Manor team in the long-term.
Automation and Integration
We integrated multiple external district calendars, including an athletics schedule, the lunch menu, and the general calendar, to make updates, edits, and adding new events easier on the back-end. On the District site, we built an integration with AppPresser.
Accessibility by Design
A school district serves everyone in their community — so we engineered a responsive contemporary design that allowed a friendly user experience on all size screens. We used markup to allow for use of screen-readers, and we published the content using a hyper-legible font from the Braille Institute meant to accommodate low-visibility users. Machine translation through Google Translate is built into the site for students and parents for whom English is not a first language.
Launch + Results
Bethink designed intuitive website structures for Penn Manor that were portable between both sites and made it easy for staff to create content, make updates to the sites, and maintain them over time.
We also delivered a web styles guide for their reference, which documented the styles for site-wide block elements for each site, identified unique visual cues that needed to be maintained throughout updates, and accommodated all planned unique block patterns surfaced by the wireframes as well as the standard Gutenberg block elements that are native to WordPress. These assets were delivered after our standard two-hour training session and documentation presentation offered with every project, giving Penn Manor all the tools and resources they needed to maintain a robust presence on both websites.