The task
In January 2018 the City of Munich contacted us to build a new website for the Alice Bendix Vocational School Center. Our contact throughout the project was the school’s headmaster; the center consists of four separate vocational schools on one campus.
The website is aimed at parents and students and intended to introduce the four vocational schools, provide information about classes and timetables, and offer an online platform to support ongoing school projects.
Since the existing site was also built with Joomla, we were asked to use it again for the new site. The client was familiar with this CMS, and at that time Joomla was the City of Munich’s recommended technology.
The requirements were familiar and clearly defined: a modern design, a responsive layout, and an intuitive backend for teaching staff.
About the client
The Alice Bendix Vocational School Center comprises four separate vocational schools for social care, nutrition, care management and dietetics and is located in central Munich.
Our solution
This was one of our first experiences working with a public institution, and the formal tendering processes were initially unfamiliar and confusing. At the same time, the school had no prior experience working with an agency, but both sides learned quickly and working with the school’s headmaster was extremely positive.
The implementation was straightforward and included the SP Page Builder, a document management extension and an extended menu structure to break the site down for the four individual schools. We also organized trainings for the teachers who would later be responsible for managing and updating the site content.
During the project we learned a lot about how schools operate, what they need from a digital platform and the practical challenges they face when running such projects—especially resource and budget allocation.
We also built a close relationship with the City of Munich and convinced them to make the results of this project modular and share them with other schools in Munich, since we recognized that these schools’ requirements were very similar.
Lessons learned
Admittedly, having a school as a client was sometimes challenging. As a public institution, it had different priorities and a different approach to a website project than we were used to.
Unlike commercial clients, a school’s main focus is on teaching—so a website is important but secondary. Our client was very involved, but it required patience and careful planning to enable regular feedback and update meetings.
Impact for the client
With support from the City of Munich, a recommendation from the headmaster of the Alice Bendix Vocational School Center and a project plan we designed with reusability for other schools in mind, this project ultimately led to us developing ten more school websites for the city. Since most of these sites were similar in function and design, we could deliver them at a fraction of the usual cost, representing significant savings for the City of Munich.