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Torwood House School

Rated 94% for coding best practices

Torwood House School

Bristol school WordPress multisite + design and development

Few places have the chance to help children grown and develop as much as schools and nurseries do, so naturally many parents take the time to ensure they pick the best school for their child.

Torwood House Independent School and Nursery, located in Bristol, offer parents and children a high standard of education and pre-school care.

Their website was not reflective of this level of quality though. It had a decent amount of relevant content, but lacked structure and as such was difficult to navigate. It also could not adapt its layout to work on mobile or tablets, which was causing a lot of users on such devices to stop using the site.

They also had a separate website for parents of current pupils, but a lot of the content (such as Term Dates and Fees) was relevant to parents of new pupils too, so a lot of it was being duplicated on to the main site as well. This was causing confusion and required more work to keep everything updated.

We developed a series of wireframes to experiment with the page layouts and structure of the site.

Torwood House School website wireframe designs
A torwood House school pupil
A torwood House school pupil featured on the website

Key Results

  • 96

    A 96% rating in accessibility

  • 94

    Rated 94% for coding best practices

  • 91

    A score of 91 out of 100 for SEO (search rankings)

  • 100

    A 100% rating for mobile friendliness

We proposed using WordPress multisite to create three distinct areas of the site, one area for the school, another for the nursery and one to act as a welcome page/hub to allow users to choose the most relevant option for them. Using WordPress multisite allowed us to clearly define each of the site areas, but also share assets between those areas, e.g. contact numbers, images, etc…

A simple menu at the top of both the nursery and school areas allows users to easily switch between the two as well, so the choice made on the hub page is by no means permanent.

To get around this problem, we came up with a list of all the different things that were on the class pages, and designed a flexible template using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin so that each teacher could pick and choose from predesigned modules. This allowed each class page to feature the unique content they wanted while retaining a familiar style and layout to the rest of the site.

Torwood House are delighted with their new site.

School children can learn. Parents can find the information they need. The school can thrive. Everyone is a winner!

We’ve got plenty of experience making school websites. Check out another one we made for Durston House school.

Liam Jay

Thanks for reading. As you've got this far, we assume you're thinking about hiring someone to design your website? We'd love to find out more.

Liam Jay. Lead Web Designer & Developer

Email Liam

Torwood House logo
We enjoyed working with SketchCode Studio and found Liam very helpful, he was always quick to help and guide us technically which is very important, if you are not technically minded! I would highly recommend working with SketchCode Studio as they provide a quick, responsive and affordable service.
Suki Ryder. Marketing Manager. Torwood House School & Nursery, Bristol.
  • Torwood House School website
  • The design for a class page template for the Torwood House school website