Sunstone Montessori

Live site: http://sunstonemontessori.org

Purpose

Sunstone's prior site was a SharePoint site that wasn't meeting their needs. It had been born during Sunstone's creation from a two-school merger, and was a slapdash affair that was thrown together because the school needed something online. It didn't say much about the school, was difficult to maintain, and was visually unimpressive. A new design was clearly called for.

Look and feel

The new look is clean and crisp without feeling corporate. Sunstone's culture and approach to education are anything but corporate, making the look a good fit.

We wanted strong visuals on the home page to make them stand out from their competion; many Montessori schools have very outdated sites, and this approach makes Sunstone's site quite memorable, which is a plus in attracting new students.

Site features

The site is mostly database-driven, with a simple content management system (CMS) to allow the school's administrative staff to make changes themselves. The calendar of school events and news announcements are all maintained by the school without any intervention from Foliosus. The same is true for almost all of the other site pages.

The CMS has been fairly heavily customized to provide special functionality like calendar synchronization with the school's Outlook-based calendars, movie embedding and paypal forms that don't require any technical knowledge on the part of the school staff.

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