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More Than Your Grades
Cheltenham Ladies' College, one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in the UK. A namesake of distinctive high-end single sex education offering young women pioneering opportunities.
Brief
A view of modern education through sophisticated photography & glimpses into life at College; aiming to dismiss many of the pre conceptions of what a boarding school 'is'.
Flexible enough to act as a versatile backdrop for the variety of co-brands and internal services.
Targeted at public presence, marketing & communication, should reflect an identity that feels elevated across both printed and digital brand touchpoints balancing the traditional and minimal.
c.250,000 visits per month
A+ observatory.mozilla.org
100/100/100/100 Lighthouse Score
AAA WCAG 2 Accessibility Score
Infrastructure
Created on a traditional LAMP stack in 2016, life started from a foundation of Silverstripe CMS with custom page templates.
Initially locally hosted at the College data centre as a VMWare Instance. Modernisation in 2019 migrated the project to an AWS EC2 Instance for improved resilience and scale.
AWS additions included moving DNS to route53, edge caching to improve the experience for overseas users with AWS Cloudfront, security enhancements from AWS WAF & Shield and a more robust backup solution with AWS Backup.
Further reducing database latency & taking advantage of AWS managed services MariaDB was swapped out for AWS RDS Database in 2020.
CI/CD is handled by Github & Github actions running a suite of unit tests developed in PHPUnit. Docker instances matching the cloud infrastructure ensure local development is consistent with the cloud offering.
In 2023 during a visual refresh Silverstripe CMS was replaced by Statamic CMS, moving to a Laravel based platform, further standardising frameworks at CLC.
Front-end
Templates allow the External Relations team to create content without technical experience. Components use standard HTML, SCSS & Native Javascript with branding options allowing reused across multiple co-brands.
To facilitate collection of user data, "User Defined Forms" module augmented Silverstripes core functionality. College had specific requirements for forms, contributions to the open source project add required functionality. My additions to the project were archived by Github into the Arctic Code Vault in 2020.
Once migrated to Statamic CMS, additional form functionality was included out the box, components were ported to Statamic Sets, with new additions to refresh the site and add new functionality.
Tailwind CSS replaced SCSS to standardise the CSS that was being written, speed up development and reduce the total CSS bundle size and duplications.
Javascript integrations added additional third party data dynamically, using API provided by each integrator. Social posts with infinite scrolling, News aggregation and RSS support was added using Flockler API.
Filterable calendars showing events from the College managed information system iSAMS API & Job vacancies from HR system with Vacancy filler API.
The CMS did not support newer image standards (AVIF), to improve users experience imagery required further optimisation. A custom image pipeline was created to take the large 30meg+ images & crop around custom focal points, resize, compress and produce variations in JPG, WEBP & AVIF reducing images to less than 100kb in size. Headers throughout this portfolio are examples of images processed in this way.
Progressive enhancements to the site were added over the life of the project improving Accessability, adding Service Workers as well as new functionality to enhance user engagement with the addition of pop-out notices, & custom animations with Greensock.
