Case study · Castletownroche National School · Co. Cork
Most people using a school website already chose the school.
School sites are usually designed as prospectuses — built to persuade a family who hasn't decided. But almost every visit comes from a parent who enrolled years ago and needs one thing: the stationery list, the finish time, or whether there's school on Monday. Usually on a phone, usually while doing something else. We designed for them first, and the prospectus second.
- Client
- Castletownroche NS, Mallow, Co. Cork
- Sector
- Education · Irish primary school
- Services
- Experience Design · Engineering · Support
- Languages
- English & Irish
- Status
- Built from scratch, supported since 2019
Two audiences who want opposite things.
Castletownroche National School sits on Close Road, outside Mallow in north Cork. Like every Irish primary school, its website has to do two jobs that pull against each other — and the one everybody designs for is the smaller of the two.
The first audience is a family deciding where to send their child. They want warmth, a sense of the place, the principal's voice, photographs of children who look happy. That's the brochure, and it's what school websites are usually built to be.
The second audience is every parent who already enrolled. They visit far more often, and they never browse. They want the stationery list for third class, the calendar, the tracksuit supplier, whether Friday is a half day. One specific thing, found in seconds, usually one-handed while making a lunch.
Underneath both sits a third job nobody mentions: the site is a statutory publisher. Irish schools must publish an Annual Admissions Notice, their child safeguarding contacts, and their policies. Legal obligations share a page with photographs of children playing.
Design for the prospectus alone and the site fails a hundred times a week. Design only for utility and the school looks like a filing cabinet. The work was holding both without either one winning.
Three constraints that don't apply to commercial sites.
A school is not a small business with a smaller budget. The obligations and the operating reality are genuinely different.
Nobody at a primary school has a communications role. Publishing happens between classes, at lunchtime, or not at all. If posting news takes more than a few minutes, the site quietly goes stale — and a stale school site tells prospective families something the school didn't intend.
The Annual Admissions Notice, the designated child safeguarding contacts, the school policies — these must be published and easy to find. They also can't be allowed to make the site feel like a compliance document.
Every image decision on this project carries a weight that a drinks brand or a print shop never has to think about. What goes online, at what resolution, with what caption, is a safeguarding question before it's a design one.
A warm front door and a fast filing system.
The structure carries both audiences. Parents get the shortest possible path to a document; prospective families get the school at its best.
The Parents section is organised around what people actually come looking for — prospectus, enrolment form, calendar, attendance, homework, tracksuit, and a stationery list broken out by class rather than bundled into one file a parent then has to search.
- A separate stationery list per class group — no scrolling to find your child's
- Documents reachable directly from the navigation, not buried in a news post
- A calendar on the homepage, because "is there school on Monday" is the most-asked question in Irish education
- Built to work on a phone held in one hand, at eight in the morning
Trees, leaves, a fox, children under a canopy — a small illustrated identity that gives the site warmth without relying on photographs of pupils to do it. It ages far better than stock imagery, and it works on the pages where a photograph wouldn't be appropriate.
- Custom illustration rather than bought stock — nothing another school also has
- Carries the warmth on pages where children's photographs shouldn't
- Drawn as scalable artwork, so it stays sharp and weighs almost nothing
- Six years on it still looks current, which stock photography would not
Each class group has its own page written in the children's voice, and teachers keep them up themselves. The news section and an Instagram feed pull the school's day-to-day life onto the site without anyone having to post twice.
- A page per class group, maintained by that teacher
- Activity pages for Green Schools, Coiste Gaelach, Student Council, sport and healthy living
- Social posts surface on the site automatically — one post, two places
- Editing simple enough that it happens during a lunch break
The principal's address in English and Irish, class pages showing real work, and then a single obvious route: the Annual Admissions Notice, and a hand-off to the school's own enrolment system rather than a form that creates a second place to check.
- Admissions Notice published as required, easy to find and current
- Pre-enrolment handed to the school's existing system — no duplicate records
- An open invitation to visit, because that's what actually converts a family
- Welcome in both languages, as a statement of identity rather than a translation
The photographs are of children.
Every other project we've worked on treats imagery as a design decision. On a primary school website it isn't. A photograph of a child on a public page is a safeguarding matter first, and everything else afterwards — what's shown, how large, whether a name appears beside a face, and who decides.
That changed how the site was built, not just what went on it. The school controls the images, the structure gives them somewhere appropriate for every kind of page, and the illustrated world means no page ever has to use a child's photograph simply to avoid looking empty.
Every image is published by school staff, not by us. Nobody outside the school makes a judgement about which children appear online.
Trees, leaves and a fox do the work that stock photographs of children usually do on school sites. The page feels alive without needing a face.
The Designated Liaison Person and deputy are named in the footer of every page — not filed under policies, where nobody in difficulty would think to look.
Not every achievement needs a photograph. Where a name and a sentence tell the story just as well, that's what the page uses.
Built around a school year, not a sprint plan.
Schools have their own rhythm. Nothing significant lands in September, and anything needed for the new year has to be ready by June.
The office knows exactly which questions come in most often. Those became the shortest paths on the site — which is a faster route to good information architecture than any workshop.
Admissions notices, policies and safeguarding contacts given permanent, findable places, so the rest of the site could be warm without ever hiding an obligation.
A small illustrated world made for this school. It cost more than stock imagery and it's the reason the site still looks like itself six years later.
Teachers were shown how to update their own class page and post news in a few minutes. If that had needed training notes, it would never have happened twice.
New calendars, new stationery lists, new admissions notices, new staff, a campaign site when the school needed one. Ongoing work, timed around term.
Six years, and every September since.
A school website has an annual heartbeat. Calendars change, stationery lists change, class groups move up, the admissions notice is republished, staff arrive and leave. None of it is large work and all of it has to happen on time.
We've been there for every one of those years since launch, including standing up a separate campaign site when the school needed to gather public support. Small clients get the same continuity as large ones — that's the whole point of how we're set up.
Chosen so a teacher can use it.
The test wasn't what we'd enjoy building. It was whether someone with fifteen spare minutes and no technical training could update their class page without calling anyone.
- WordPress
- Visual page editing
- Staff-managed content
- Document library
- School events calendar
- News section
- Social feed
- Class & activity pages
- Annual Admissions Notice
- Safeguarding contacts
- School policies
- Privacy notice
- Annual content updates
- Platform maintenance
- Staff guidance
- Additional sites when needed
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