How We Created a Mobile-First Responsive Website for an Ahmedabad School

Located in one of Ahmedabad’s fastest developing areas, Shivashish World School (SWS) is a premier co-educational school which started back in the year 1994. A charitable trust started the school with Gujarati medium but with time the school got its CBSE affiliation and introduced English medium. In the year 2021, they went through a major expansion and re-branding exercise, which included a completely new building, identity design and re-doing their digital presence across website and social media.

The school wanted a total revamp of their design and branding, so one of Ahmedabad’s best digital marketing agencies came up with a best in class website to help them achieve a complete image makeover.

THE CLIENT’S PROBLEM

Incepted more than 28 years ago, SWS has been imparting high-quality education from kindergarten right to high school. In 2021, they set up a new world class building for their CBSE board, but realized that in the post-pandemic era, most parents were going to discover them online first. Unfortunately, their existing website did not match the scale and aesthetic of the new building. The website was also being used for two different brands, the Gujarat Board school, called Shivashish School, and the CBSE school, called SWS, creating confusion for the user.

Moreover, the old website had been designed primarily for the desktop, with its mobile version created almost as an after-thought. However, a quick look at their analytics showed that up to 90% of their unique users accessed the website through mobile devices. All of whom were being served a sub-par experience.

The school also realized that most of the things that made them unique, such as their pedagogy, amenities and most of all its teaching staff had to be showcased better!

The history of the school as presented in old website

SOLUTION PRESENTED BY FLORA FOUNTAIN

Neomorphism in the footer of the new SWS website

Since most parents were accessing the website from a cell phone, we decided to create a mobile-first website, a first for any school in Ahmedabad, that was dynamic and sleek. Modern design concepts like glassmorphism, neumorphism, micro animations, extensive use of swipe, and an almost app-like UI were identified to create a modern website matching the new identity of the school. In order to accomplish this, we decided to design and develop a completely new mobile-first website, which was a first for any school in Ahmedabad.

PHASE 1: ANALYSIS

According to research, 61% of mobile users are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site. That means, more than half of the target audience, parents, would look for schools in their locality on their phones. So on the basis of the research conducted on their website usage and research on the new mobile web technologies, we listed some points to work on.

1) There was a lot of information available for parents, students, and teachers. So the information architecture of the old website needed to be fleshed out better for users to easily navigate through the website.

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5 Nightmares Every Web Developer Dreads

While everyone and their aunt talks about things developers dig, what coders love to create and so on, we are surprised how nobody is talking about what developers love to hate, the coding horrors that give them nightmares.

With a team of sharp web developers working on some of the best websites designed and developed in Ahmedabad India, we have learnt at close quarters about the many things that keep our talented techies up at night, things they dread. And they are…

1. FIXING SOMEONE ELSE’S BAD CODE AND BUGS

The one thing that every developer fears while joining a new company, is the cleanup job of any project developed by someone else. Developers hate touching someone else’s code. And it’s a horror story if the code they’re working on is lengthy, unreadable, complex, riddled with bugs and LIVE.

Wondering why this happens so often? That’s because developers, just like writers and painters, have their own style of coding. A good developer will always document his/her code, to ensure the sanity of anyone who might have to work on their code in future. Yes, this includes themselves too.

Of course documentation is a painful process and it’s the second most hated thing for most developers, but without it, any new developer will have to scour through thousands of lines of the original code to figure out what the former developer was thinking. And trust us, it is a NIGHTMARE!

2. THIS, THAT, EVERYTHING IS A TOP PRIORITY!

Three developers walk into a bar, they start discussing their priority tasks and bugs. The bartender chipped in, “I KNOW, RIGHT… THAT’S WHY I CHOSE BARTENDING OVER CODING!”

Developers absolutely hate it when their project managers come up to them and keep adding new “top-priority” tasks on their plate and still expect them to complete all the previously ongoing ones at the end of the day.Prioritizing means ranking tasks on the basis of its importance and urgency. It’s not rocket science for anyone to not get it. Of the many developers we have worked with while offering website development and web design services in Ahmedabad, most of us have recalled of instances where they have been expected to work on two projects in parallel or multitask because Task A and Task B both are ‘Top Priority’

Surprise, surprise, that’s not how it is supposed to work! It’s just a pure case of bad management and project heads and team leads cannot blame their developers for their poor estimation of deadlines.

3. MEETINGS, A LOT OF THEM!

THIS MEETING COULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL!

Developers absolutely hate it when they are pulled into “quick meetings” that last close to an hour and have no clear objective or agenda. This causes interruptions in the flow of their work and forces them to clock extra hours in the office to finish their work for their “Top Priority” projects.

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Here’s How to Retain SEO Ranking Even after a Website Redesign

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Rankings are sensitive and are prone to changing every time there is a change in the design or content of the website without planning for SEO. During a website redesign or redevelopment, there is a high risk of the website losing its organic traffic, rankings and sales.

While there are plenty of blogs and conversation online revolving around how to make a website rank higher up on the search engine results pages (SERP), very few talk specifically about maintaining those rankings, even in the event of a redesign on the website. So, let’s talk about retaining a website’s rankings on the SERP after a redesign on the site and look at some of the tips shared by the SEO experts at Flora Fountain, a digital agency offering SEO Services in Ahmedabad.

SAVE THE ORIGINAL WEBSITE’S DATA FIRST

One of the ways to ensure website’s rankings don’t suffer heavily is by maintaining a similarity in the flow of content and design of the old site. Because search engines rank those pages or websites higher that are easy to navigate. It is important to save the old or current website’s data, i.e. a list of all the pages, its URLs, important pieces of content, keywords and the sitemap for future reference. It helps the developers and designers to ensure the user experience doesn’t get disturbed on the redesigned website.

DON’T MAKE CHANGES ON THE LIVE SITE

This is an important point to remember. While making changes or during the redesigning process, the website must be disabled. The updated version should be made live only after testing. But disabling a website means the business will lose many customers and visitors who might be trying to access the site. It is advised to do it on a different domain. Experts providing top SEO services in India suggest that all the changes and updates should be made in a different domain or a staging site, and once all the changes provide satisfactory results in testing, only then the new site be swapped with the old one live on the internet.

USE 301 REDIRECTS

When there is a change in the URLs, make sure to have 301 Redirects for them. The 301 Redirects notifies the search engines that the content has been shifted to a new location and takes the visitors to the new web page from the old one.

A broken link can damage the ranking of the website, which will eventually lead to losing organic traffic to the website. This happens because the search engine assigns the existing ranking to the new page only after it knows that both the pages have the same content in them.

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Building the Perfect Website Is a Collaboration Between Design and Development

A website is a great tool for digital marketing, selling online and for building credibility for a business. But an average user spends hardly 15 seconds on a website. In order to make them stay longer and engage with the website, the website must be visually pleasing and easy to interact with.

It is a collaboration between great design and robust development that creates a smashing website. Here’s a look at how Flora Fountain, the best website development and design agency in Ahmedabad works to create the perfect website for its brands and businesses

But first, let’s understand what web design and web development is.

Web Design

Website Design or Web Design refers to designing everything from the user experience to the user interface, basically all the visual elements of the website and their usability from the perspective of a user. Web designers focus on designing the front-end of the website, the part which the users get to see on the internet and interact with.

They recreate the visual ideas by creating the 1. wireframes showing the layout of the website 2. creating styleguides detailing the details of the visual elements such as fonts, buttons, text treatment for different sections and so on 3. defining the interactive elements that might need to be animated. For responsive design, designers end up creating separate layout for mobile and desktop.  Once done, they work with developers to get their vision executed and tested in code.

As a web design agency in Ahmedabad, design is at the forefront of every website we create, after all, a website is the face of every brand on digital.

Web Development

Web development or website development team usually consists of front-end and backend developers who write code that brings the wireframes to life as a working website. The front-end team code in browser-based client-side technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript to creating what the visitors will see when they open the website in a browser, while the backend team works in server-side programming languages like PHP, Nodejs, Python, Ruby to ensure that the business logic and the functionality of any features being planned for the website are fully incorporated.

So, how does design & development work together?

1. Getting the Requirements

Information gathering is the first and foremost activity that takes place to build a website from scratch. The product owner (or manager) with the help of design, content and technology teams defines the purpose of the website, the target audience, the requirements from the client and the users for this website, and the kind of content and functionality that will be made available to the end user.

2. Creating an Information Architecture or Sitemap

With the requirements in place, now it’s time to decide what goes where and how. This exercise is ideally done by the product owner in tandem with the content team. Together they flesh out the pages required on the website and the information hierarchy or flow required to show all the information required as per the original brief.

3. Creating the Wireframe & Styleguide

A website wireframe comprises of the skeletal framework required for each page of the website. Together with the styleguide, this is the blueprint of the website. Creating the wireframes can be as simple as sketching on paper, or they can be created professionally using tools like Sketch, InVision, Adobe XD or Figma

For getting your websites wireframe made professionally, you can always contact us.

4. Building the first mocks

A mock is the working, visual replica or prototype of the website created keeping in mind the user interface of the site. While usually having a wireframe and style guide is enough, for more complicated designs, a detailed mock with each element, pictures and sample content is sometimes required. This mock gives an idea on how all the elements will come together on a page, and is useful for getting feedback from the client, before beginning coding. For responsive websites, separated mockups for desktop, mobile and even tablets might be required.

Custom website design through mockups is one of Flora Fountain’s core strengths as a website development agency.

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