Case Study
Havergal College
Future-Ready Orientation for Havergal College
Trew Knowledge turned more than 125 years of history into a modern website for Havergal College, a staple of Canadian education and development for today’s young women, delivering a robust and rigorous academic curriculum.
Brands We Serve
Overview
With an educational proposal extremely focused on providing paths to a promising and challenging future for its students while maintaining a fun, engaging and unique enrollment experience across the institution, Havergal College turned to Trew Knowledge so that, together, we could translate its mission, strategic direction and each of its values into a website that would showcase the complete Havergal College experience, be more accessible, bring digital wisdom to the forefront of its message, and demonstrate its commitment to innovation.
01.
Goals
As discovered through consultation, a primary goal that emerged was also to deliver to prospective students, existing students, respective parents, guardians and community members an opportunity to share in the decision-making process of selecting the best educational programs for future growth.
By creating a solution that presented a wealth of easy-to-find information, including interactive components, alongside a transparent view into life at Havergal College, the new site now allows for an improved collaborative experience for selecting the best fit for today’s modern young woman. Further, by focusing on industry standards for accessibility compliance, the new solution is now more accessible than ever.
02.
Design
Overall, the new web experience took a clean, luxurious, and minimalist design approach to meet not only accessibility standards but also make the site more user-friendly, bold, and flexible as it evolves. Understanding the challenge that site managers experienced in maintaining a consistent design approach, the solution also took into consideration the importance of backend administration of the site to empower content creators to continue creating beautiful experiences. By leveraging a modular approach to Gutenberg blocks and ensuring that backend CMS also represented the exact front-end experience, the new solution allowed admins to quickly, accurately, and uniquely create content using the components that can be used across the site.
03.
To Do More and to Do Better
While developing a user-friendly solution for users and administrators, some of the challenges that were overcome also included migrating the site to a more stable and secure hosting environment. As such, a stable environment solution for the application that followed best practices provided the Havergal College ecosystem with a reliable infrastructure and managed WordPress-hosted solution.
With stability, the team gained agility with a modern, custom WordPress Gutenberg theme that not only allows admins to create and build pages to meet campaign initiatives but to create unique layouts and rich media content and manage all aspects of the web application from navigation, dynamic custom blocks, standardized patterns, reusable blocks, forms and more, bringing freedom to the creative process and development of content.
04.
A Dedicated Facilities Experience
As Havergal College’s digital ecosystem continues to evolve, the need emerged for a dedicated experience to support facilities access and tennis court bookings. Rather than expanding the primary site with increasingly complex facilities content, the work extended Havergal’s WordPress multisite network with a purpose-built microsite. The microsite surfaces real-time facility availability and guides users into booking flows through integrated third-party platforms, while keeping the experience clear and scalable as future facilities initiatives unfold.
To support this evolution, the solution introduced a new theme built with WordPress Full Site Editing capabilities, extending Havergal’s existing visual styles while enabling greater flexibility, consistency, and long-term maintainability across templates and components.
The Results
Helping Havergal College focus on managing its on and off-campus educational marketing activities, and leaving us to do what we do best, Trew Knowledge is also responsible for the maintenance and support of the new website, whether in problem solving or in the continuous improvement and evolution of its functions.
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