When I first asked our consultants for recommendations for our Website of the Week, I was told that “when it goes up onto the web, Warden Park has to be one”. So when I got the notification that Warden Park was online I was quite excited to check it out – and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Continue reading →

The design of Grampian Primary’s School Jotter site is what happens when a school takes an active interest in creating a theme. We like to use them as an example of how each school can create a great-looking, unique website, in this case through the creative usage of mascots embodying the school’s values.
The website’s stylised, cartoonish design is perfect for engaging pupils, and shows off a school who like to have a bit of fun, but who also take pastoral care seriously – the school’s mascots are “Creator, Resolver, Teamer, Reacher, Thinker and Reflector”, and we think their site really helps push these values.
The site doesn’t just look good though – it’s easy to get around from the homepage. There’s no rooting around in endless nested menus, all content (including access to the Learn VLE platform) is accessible from the drop-down main menu below the scrolling banner. There’s a distinct danger of such homepages becoming “busy”, but Grampian manages to avoid this through bold usage of titles and great placement of images to break up blocks of text.
As nice as our modern, uber themes can look, sometimes the best-looking sites are the most unique ones. Grampian really does stand out from the crowd with a well-designed, attractive and interesting site, so we’re pleased to make them our School Jotter of the Week.

Flagship Schools: Bush Hill Park from Webanywhere on Vimeo.

A few months back we attended the launch party for one of our websites at Bush Hill Park in London, and were really overwhelmed by the positive responses we received from parents, teachers and students. BHP is one of our first “uber” themes – a new type of theme designed to be on the cutting edge of web design. These fully-responsive school websites feature large images spanning their pages, bold colours and a tile-based system of navigation.
Whether you’re on a PC, phone or tablet, the Bush Hill Park website is very easy to navigate. There’s no fiddly menus or awkward links to click, and all information is quickly available behind the tiles or large options. The use of icons on buttons also helps out the parents at the school – a relatively large number of whom do not speak English as a first language (also available is the option to Google Translate all pages – a feature standard on all Jotter sites).
It’s not just about what you can see on the surface though – Bush Hill Park make use of the full range of School Jotter apps. Whether the pupils are building their own Portfolios, learning from Learn or sharing information on Forums, all can be done from within the School Jotter environment. While the parents can easily navigate the external-facing website, students and teachers can take full advantage of our internal-facing apps.
It was a great privilege to be able to attend the launch of one of our customers’ websites, and that it was of such a high quality really was the icing on the cake. We’re really proud of what we’ve been able to achieve working with Bush Hill Park, and wish them the best of luck going forward.

Whenever one of our account managers is asked for an example of a great school website, he always picks the same one, and it’s pretty easy to see why – Chandlers Field is a modern, professional-looking website that really shows off the capabilities of the School Jotter platform as well as the open, contemporary nature of the school itself.
The site is designed with clean, modern lines and a blue-tinted palette, and wouldn’t look out of place as the homepage for a major company. There are traditional Schooljotter hallmarks, of course, such as the “swoosh” wave effect at the bottom of the banner, but they’re given a distinctly modern twist. The large amount of space given to the slideshow gives the school a real chance to show off images and values.
Navigating the site is easy and fluid, with a combined approach on sub-pages of the navigation bar at the top and a menu bar to the left, providing permanent, breadcrumb-like access to all levels of the site’s hierarchy. Additionally, there’s some very nice transition effects on the homepage between the “Latest News” and “Calendar” tabs, making an economical use of the space and letting both the latest news and the calendar have pride of place.
In the seven months the site has been live, Chandlers Field has received a huge amount of praise from staff at Webanywhere and is frequently held up as an example of the flexibility of School Jotter’s primary school web designs, so we’re confident in naming them our School Jotter of the Week.

We’re reviving the “Website of the Week” feature – check back every Tuesday when we’ll be shining our spotlight on yet another fantastic Jotter Site.
Hungerford brings a modern, tile-based design to its website, making great use of both contrasting colours with clean lines and imagery. The site went live in May 2015, and we can clearly see the school’s been getting great usage out of it in the ensuing months.
The first thing you see when you load the page is a stylised design of Stephenson’s Rocket, a reference to the railway heritage of the Crewe-based school. This is on the left of the header, leaving the right open for a large, circular slideshow of images of the school, for a thoroughly unique design. Below this, the image-based tiles provide an easy way of navigating around the site.
Scrolling down, we can see some great usage of School Jotter Site’s embedded objects. Parents, students and teachers can quickly see what’s happening at the school from the dynamic content, ranging from a visual calendar of events through to the latest news and a twitter feed – a surprisingly rare thing amongst primary schools! Promoting a twitter feed on the front page of a website is a great way to gain followers, as well as to show engagement with them.
The overall design of the site is one that’s elegant, informative and tailored to the school – this is no “one-size-fits-all” cheap template. Our designers have consulted with the school and their account manager in order to create a theme which perfectly reflects the school’s ethos.

With School Jotter website designs, every school can have a website design that’s completely personal and bespoke to them.
Continue reading →

Recently, we featured a School Jotter website that acted as a website for two schools (Mary Howard and St Andrew’s Primary Schools) and talked about how this can be a useful solution for smaller schools that want a fantastic website without the price tag.
Continue reading →

It’s always nice when a school opts for an out-of-the-ordinary website design. Parley First School in Dorset have gone for a website design that’s different to any website we have designed and produced in recent memory.
Continue reading →

Having an engaging, easy-to-use website system like School Jotter comes with its benefits – like improving home/school links, and allowing all teaching staff to contribute to the school website. But sometimes, smaller schools are put off by the cost of these benefits.
Continue reading →

One of the best things about writing our weekly School Jotter of the Week blog post is the number of great school websites we get to share with you. Plus, looking back over the past couple of years, we can see how the Webanywhere school website design team have gone from strength to strength!
Continue reading →