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Overview
Modernizing a School Website While Preserving Its Recognizable Identity
Arnold Ipolyi Basic School in Balog nad Ipľom is a nine-grade educational institution serving students from 10 municipalities. Its established website documented years of school activities, educational projects, extracurricular programs, competitions, and community events through an extensive collection of articles, photographs, videos, and official documents.
The aging website required modernization while retaining the familiar visual identity recognized by students, parents, and the wider school community. Playful Sparkle rebuilt the website using WordPress, transferred its extensive content archive, and improved the site’s usability, accessibility, and internal content management structure.
Objective
Modernize the school’s website without abandoning its established visual identity, migrate its existing articles and media into a maintainable WordPress environment, and improve how visitors access school information. The project also aimed to give school staff more practical publishing tools and introduce dedicated functionality for presenting excursion locations on Google Maps.
Content Migration Deliverables
Scope of Work
Impact
The modernized website preserves the school’s recognizable visual identity while providing an updated, more accessible and usable interface. The migration brought the institution’s extensive digital archive into the new WordPress platform, retaining years of educational content, school activities, photographs, videos, and administrative documentation.
The improved content calendar provides staff with a more practical way to organize and manage website publications. The KML feed implementation also adds a dedicated way to explore school excursions through location markers on Google Maps, connecting published excursion information with the places visited.
Together, these improvements provide the school with an updated website and a more structured foundation for maintaining its online presence and documenting future activities.
Approach
The project began with the existing website’s visual identity and content structure as core requirements. The school principal requested that the new design remain close to the original because students already associated it with the institution. Playful Sparkle therefore focused on modernizing the underlying implementation and improving usability and accessibility without introducing an unnecessarily different visual direction.
WordPress provided the new platform, while Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) was used to recreate the website’s internal content structure. This allowed the different content types and sections to be organized around the school’s publishing requirements.
The migration covered the existing articles, pages, photographic galleries, videos, school newspapers, and administrative documents. The work also included improvements to the content calendar to make publishing activities easier to manage.
For school excursions, Playful Sparkle implemented a KML feed that provides location data for displaying excursion destinations as markers on Google Maps. This functionality adds a geographic dimension to the school’s published activity records while preserving the website’s existing focus on documenting school life.