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St Margaret's Anglican Girls School

St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School is an independent day and boarding school established in 1895. St Margaret’s is well known for its focus on academic excellence, quality teaching and learning, and its commitment to pastoral care.

The Challenge

We were using a solution which was developed in-house. From a technical perspective, it lacked the features and flexibility to present the website in the way in which we wanted; it also presented a risk as it required a highly skilled SharePoint developer, exposing us if we ever lost that in-house expertise (as external SharePoint consultants are very expensive to engage). Our website was also not optimised for mobile, penalising us on search engines.

Aesthetically, the design was dated and a rebrand of the whole website was required to better reflect St Margaret’s brand and values.

The new website had to be intuitive and simple to use, with security permissions to assign levels of access to different people. It also needed to be future proof; continuing to meet our needs while offering the capacity to add an intranet.

We found that Elcom team members take their expertise, and professionally, enthusiastically and sincerely apply it to our business needs and are very solution focused on behalf of their client. They are always responsive to a client’s needs and very supportive. Wendy Johnston, Director of Marketing & Communications
St Margaret's Anglican Girls School

St Margaret

The Solution


We had an advisory website committee made up of parents and staff members. We found Elcom to be the most cost effective solution over the long term. They also have a strong reputation developing good sites with well known and prestigious schools.

The Elcom team was always keen to find solutions that would work within the scope of the existing tools. This meant we didn’t have to implement many custom features at additional cost. Our Project Manager was always on hand to go through anything we required assistance with.

Elcom’s designers respected our expertise around design and our own branding. They listened to what we hoped to achieve and came up with satisfactory solutions. It was always an open two way conversation and I appreciated that.

We love the design. It is clean, modern and attractive, and showcases the breadth and depth of the school through elements such as the video background header.

The Elcom platform is by far the easiest CMS I’ve personally used. Creating and managing pages is simple. The audit trail capabilities help us keep track of who created or modified any content. There’s also flexibility with how the pages are presented on the website; I can easily have the menu on the left and my choice of one or two additional columns or no menu at all.

Previously we used a form system, that while functional was aesthetically challenged and therefore did not provide the optimum user-experience. We were really impressed with the Elcom forms. They’re easy to use, to set up, to generate a report, to create PDFs and so on. We can now have full control of developing the report and changing the form. The workflow capability also means emails are sent to the right person. We use forms to automatically register people for open days, enrolment interviews and other school events.

The news and events feature is great for engaging the parents of current students, Old Girls and prospective clients (most importantly). Non-technical users can create and publish events and quickly post links to our social media accounts that link back to the site.

We can also assign different levels of access to people and groups, with an overall administrator of the website who can make changes to the master content.

The Benefits

The primary objective of our website is to attract students and encourage parents to enrol their children at St Margaret’s. Our analytics are showing greater engagement - more page views, more time on page and fewer bounce rates.
  • Since the start of this year, we’ve generated 306k pageviews and 250k unique pageviews. Of these, ‘Prospectus and Fees’ and ‘How to Enrol’ are the most viewed pages. This is a great indication that the new website is helping us achieve our primary objective.
  • The eNews feature is also popular, especially as parents can read it on their phones. Scrolling through is easy because it’s mobile responsive. With 48% of our audience viewing our website on mobile and tablet, this is very important to us. 
  • Even simple features, like having attractive news and events pages and being able to quickly post these to social media, have made our lives so much easier. We didn’t have these features before.
  • The website has really met our brand expectations in what we wanted to communicate and achieve. It has a new clean design, beautiful images, easy navigation and a call to action at the bottom of every page. Being able to present the brand in this way, has taken it to a much higher level. We have had people call us, wanting to know who developed our website as it was “one of the best school websites they had seen”.

 

 

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