Portfolio: Aurora School

The Organization: Aurora School is a private K-5 school in Oakland, California. The school promotes a Progressive approach to its curriculum and classroom experiences. The student body is approximately one hundred students. The staff is composed of twenty five teachers, teaching assistants and specialists as well as seven administrators and support staff.

Their Needs: The school had a website that had been designed and built over five years ago and was maintained by parent volunteers. The site's architecture was becoming ineffective for the school's expanding communication needs, mixing public content with current parent specific content. No page layout templates existed, so inconsistent navigational and content presentation started to show up. The school needed to quickly update its image, so it could effectively compete with the other independent schools in the coming round of student applications.

The Solution: Stellar IT Solutions received the contract for the website in July 2007 and less than three months later launched a 100+ page website with individually chosen images, five interactive forms and numerous video clips of teachers, staff and parents giving their personal perspectives about the school and its educational philosophy.

Stellar IT Solutions met the customer's short timeline requirement by providing a turnkey solution for all aspects of the development process. Stellar IT Solutions developed a new navigational structure, managed content owners and decision makers so they would keep to a tight timeline, provided not only copy editing but also writing expertise, searched through thousands of photographs to identify the appropriate 150 or so images for the website, produced videos and built the website on its development environment for rapid development and approval cycles. The site went live in October 2007, just in time for student application season.