Základná škola Narnia
The design process was brief but effective. A few sketches laid down the art direction with minimal need for review. I knew that I needed to have a lot of photos of happy children and designed around them bringing the visual punch I wanted. The homepage carousel was designed to simultaneously express Základná škola Narnia’s core values while visually drawing the user into the world it had created for its students.
As the resident designer, network administrator, and overall technology evangelist, my aim was for this website to solve problems with how information was disseminated. That meant having a functional bilingual website in Slovak and English. It also meant news feeds for each grade level as well as a main channel for school wide news. All of this news would then propagate dedicated class pages with RSS and email subscription options to keep parents informed with what was going on at school. Lastly, a photo gallery would accompany everything to provide albums for classes and events throughout the year. The idea was that the vast majority of site users (returning parents) would land on the home page or dedicated class pages. The rest of the site was built around the information flow that best suited the parents of incoming students. The site was built on WordPress for its ease of use and multilingual friendly features. This allowed each teacher to have control of their classes page and a centralized voice to reach out to parents.
Major challenges included, but were certainly not limited to, the obvious language barrier (I don’t speak Slovak), supporting legacy browsers, and developing a multilingual friendly site structure. It was common to find best practices often used in the United States that simply didn’t translate literally or systematically.