We explored other school website designs and used this to develop our own criteria. We chose Elcom because they offered everything we were looking for – extensive educational institution experience, one platform offering everything we needed and additional solutions if we were to look beyond the website in the future.
The initial engagement was very prompt and that continued throughout the project. Being in a different state did not hinder the project at all. Everything was done smoothly through online meetings, calls and the project tracker. The team were on hand to support us as if they were locally based. Training, in particular, was brilliant because we had the recordings and online reference material to refer back to.
We found our Project Manager, designers and Training Manager very accommodating, at times, going beyond the brief to make sure we were getting the information we were asking for. They were thinking about us as a customer and our needs and making sure that we were comfortable with what we were using.
Elcom delivered a modern and easy to update website. It highlights photographs in a contemporary and engaging way, displays a library of documents that can be searched and filtered, and includes great reporting tools so we can continually optimise our website.
Being mobile-responsive was key for us as many of our families use their phones to manage their busy lives. Having an intuitive website and access to online forms and events has been enthusiastically received by our school community.
Our enrolment process is now completely online. It was easy and user-friendly to implement. Previously, there were eight or so documents that families needed to manually complete to enrol their child, often resulting in inaccuracies, incomplete fields and missing documents. With the online form builder, we are able to make fields mandatory so they cannot be skipped over. There are sections for people to upload supporting documents along with the ability to sign the form with their finger or mouse, depending on what device they are using.
The enrolment form is linked to a workflow in the backend, so it is automatically sent to our Enrolment Officer. We can easily track each application including who it is sitting with internally or if there is additional information required from the parent, as well as how many enrolments are coming through. In the future, we plan to link to and capture payments as part of the online enrolment process.
The other important feature was the events module. This lets us create, display, and manage events and activities on our website. Users can search for, filter, and register for these events and save the invite to their calendars. We also plan to integrate the events module into a payment gateway to process online payments.