Success Story
Edmonton Catholic Schools (ECSD) and SchoolBundle are celebrating a decade of collaborative and highly effective communications. In 2020 Edmonton launched an all-new design with an upgrade to their Content Management System (CMS), leveraging the latest features in the SchoolBundle platform.
ECSD is enjoying their fresh, user-first design across the entire district. The powerful and intuitive CMS delivered through AZURE has allowed them to leave SharePoint behind.
Edmonton Catholic Schools started back in 1888 when three sisters from the order of the Faithful Companions of Jesus sailed from France and began teaching just 23 students in the very first Catholic school in Edmonton.
Since then, the division has grown many times over, enrolling over 44,330 students at 95 schools and offering numerous immersion and bilingual programs, including French Immersion, Polish Bilingual, Spanish Bilingual, and Ukrainian Bilingual programs. With many new immigrant, Indigenous and early learning programs as well, ECSD provides a Christ-centered, competency-based learning experience for all learners, right in the heart of Edmonton, Alberta.
Within the current mobile-first world, ECSD needed a fresh, user-centric website. It was time for the old site to retire and be replaced with a modern, easy to navigate, fully mobile experience.
The full re-design was achieved with a step by step collaboration between SchoolBundle and Edmonton Catholic Schools to meet the needs of every stakeholder in their audience - staff, students, teachers, parents and their community. It was particularly challenging to manage the extensive content migration from the existing site onto the new CMS, migrating thousands of pages, while simultaneously auditing and eliminating redundant content.
“This project was a perfect collaboration between our two teams. Together we developed a clean, modern-looking design that met our goals of creating an easy, user-friendly experience. The design made great use of white space and became more engaging by utilizing subtle interactions across the site.”
Richard Plantt, RGD, Creative Director, SchoolBundle
An exciting aspect of this project was the upgrade to SchoolBundle’s latest platform; built in AZURE, this project helped ECSD move beyond SharePoint, into a beautiful and intuitive new CMS. Their team can now make edits and changes quickly and easily, without having to involve IT. With the new WYSIWYG editor and single-source publishing, everyone on the ECSD team can create and share content wherever it needs to go.
A four-step process took the team from idea to launch.
Working with the ECSD team, SchoolBundle outlined the problems, challenges and goals for the new websites. At this stage, the biggest hurdle was understanding how the migration of the content would progress. Through a series of consultations, milestones were set to provide a clear pathway to success.
The core of the design work happened here. ECSD came forward with their initial ideas and outlines for the new design and site structure, which SchoolBundle took, fine-tuned and completed using our decades of experience and knowledge in the education industry. During this phase, our team provided structural guidelines, best practices and expertise together with the ECSD team to develop a cleaner, more user-friendly experience to visitors.
SchoolBundle’s development team went to work making the new web design a reality. Once the structure was in place our team set-up the full content migration using our own tool from the existing SharePoint pages to their gorgeous new CMS.
The final piece of this project was the implementation. District and School sites were branded according their colours and final quality checks were completed on design and content. We prepared the sites for go-live, provided access to our training resources for their new CMS and handed over the completed project. After the project was launched, we began and continue providing multi-channel technical and customer support for our platform.
Collaboration was the key to this project. The brilliant work done by the Edmonton Catholic Schools team enabled us to utilize our full scope of knowledge and experience to create the fantastic new websites now online for all of ECSD. In this relationship, as with all our customers, feedback on the platform was and remains a priority for our team as we develop the SchoolBundle platform to better meet the growing needs of the education industry. With the finalization and launch of this project, we are excited to begin working on the next phase of our work with ECSD, upgrading their Employee Portal to our new system and further enabling unified communications within their entire division.
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