For Vermont SC, we designed and developed a custom WordPress website that makes information easier to find, improves content management for staff, and gives the school community a modern, accessible digital experience.
Vermont Secondary College is a large, co-educational public secondary school located in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Established in 1962, the College supports students from Years 7 to 12, with a focus on academic excellence, innovative curriculum, student growth, and a broad co-curricular program.
As the school continued to evolve, its website had become an increasingly important communication tool for students, parents, staff, prospective families, and the broader community. But the existing site no longer reflected the quality, professionalism, or scale of the College.
Spacey Studios was engaged to completely redesign and redevelop the Vermont Secondary College website, creating a modern custom WordPress platform that was easier to navigate, easier to manage, more secure, and better aligned with the needs of a busy school community.
The new website launched in November 2024, giving the College a smarter, more reliable digital home heading into the 2025 school year.
Vermont Secondary College’s existing website was severely outdated.
Originally developed in the 2000s or early 2010s, the site was difficult to manage, hard to navigate, and in some areas, impossible for staff to update. Content was scattered across the site without a clear structure, visitors were regularly met with broken links and 404 errors, and key information was not always easy to find.
The site was also hosted on an on-premises server, creating unnecessary risks around security, stability, uptime, and performance. If there was a power, network, or server issue, the website could go down — placing extra pressure on the school’s internal IT team.
The College also did not have an internal marketing or creative team managing the site. Updates were handled by office and admin staff, so the new platform needed to be simple, practical, and intuitive for non-technical users.
The project needed to solve several issues at once:
We rebuilt the website from the ground up.
Rather than trying to patch the existing site structure, we started with discovery, content planning, and information architecture. The goal was to understand what information mattered most, who needed to access it, and how the website should be structured to support real-world use.
From there, we planned a clearer sitemap and developed wireframes around the key content pathways. This helped us create a more logical structure for the site, making information easier to browse and reducing the frustration that came with the old website.
Once the structure was in place, we designed a clean, modern interface aligned with Vermont Secondary College’s brand guidelines. The design needed to feel professional and contemporary, but also highly legible, accessible, and easy to navigate for a wide audience — including students, parents, staff, prospective families, and international visitors.
The result was a website experience built around clarity, usability, and long-term flexibility.
A key focus of the project was improving the front-end experience.
For a large school website, users often arrive with a specific task in mind. They may be looking for enrolment information, term dates, policies, curriculum details, announcements, contact information, or year-level resources. The site needed to help people find what they were looking for quickly, without forcing them to dig through disconnected pages.
To support this, we designed a more intuitive navigation system, including a full-screen navigation experience that gives users a clear overview of the site. The navigation was structured to make key areas easier to understand, while the site-wide search tool gives visitors a faster way to find specific information.
Breadcrumbs were also introduced to make the page hierarchy clearer, helping users understand where they are within the site and move between related sections more easily.
Accessibility was another important consideration. We applied WCAG-led thinking throughout the design, particularly around typography, colour contrast, legibility, and content clarity. This helped make the site more inclusive for users with different learning needs, lower vision, or varying levels of digital confidence.
Behind the scenes, the website was built on WordPress with a tailored content management setup.
The College needed a platform that office and admin staff could manage confidently without development knowledge. To support this, we integrated a drag-and-drop editing experience using WPBakery, alongside custom-made sections and templates that made content creation more flexible.
This allowed staff to update text, images, documents, and pages more easily, while still maintaining design consistency across the site.
We also implemented custom user permissions, ensuring staff could access the areas they needed without accidentally changing or breaking global settings. This created a safer and more manageable editing environment for the College team.
The goal was to give staff flexibility without overwhelming them — empowering the team to manage everyday updates internally while keeping the website stable and professionally structured.
Because the old website had a large amount of scattered content and broken pathways, migration needed to be handled carefully.
We reviewed the existing site and mapped hundreds of legacy URLs to their new locations. This helped preserve important access points, reduce broken links, and ensure users arriving from old bookmarks, search results, or shared links would still reach the right content where possible.
The new website was also moved to a cloud-hosted environment, retiring the risks associated with on-premises hosting. This improved stability, performance, uptime, and overall reliability — giving the College a stronger technical foundation for the future.
Security was a major priority.
As a public school with a broad community presence, the website needed to be properly protected against common risks, including unauthorised access and admin credential breaches. We implemented security hardening, including 2-Factor Authentication, to help protect the site and its users.
Performance was also optimised through image and file compression, site and server caching, and the use of a content delivery network. These measures helped keep the website fast and stable, even as content grows over time.
We also established core SEO foundations, helping the new site launch with a cleaner structure, stronger technical setup, and better long-term visibility.
A successful website handover was just as important as the build itself.
Because the site would be managed internally by non-technical staff, we provided in-person training to help the team feel confident using the new system. We also created a tailored admin handbook with step-by-step instructions covering key website tasks, including publishing updates, uploading documents, editing content, and managing pages.
This gave the College an always-available reference they could return to whenever needed, reducing reliance on external support for everyday updates.
The final website gives Vermont Secondary College a modern, secure, and easy-to-manage digital platform built for everyday use and future growth.
The new site is easier to navigate, easier to update, and more aligned with the quality and professionalism of the College. Information is structured more clearly, content is more accessible, and the back-end experience gives staff the confidence to manage updates internally.
Since launching in November 2024 (comparing data through to October 2025), the website had shown strong levels of traffic and interaction, with:
While there was no reliable data available from the previous website to compare directly, these figures indicate strong ongoing use from the school community and show that the new website is actively supporting its intended purpose.
Most importantly, the site now gives Vermont Secondary College a stable, scalable platform that can continue to evolve with the school.
Vermont Secondary College is one of our favourite website projects because it brought together so many parts of what we enjoy most: strategy, structure, design, technical problem-solving, and long-term usability.
The scale of the project gave us the opportunity to really think through how a large school website should work. This was not just about making the site look more modern. It was about rebuilding the entire digital experience so that students, parents, staff, and prospective families could find what they needed more easily.
We were also trusted with a high level of creative and technical responsibility, which allowed us to guide the project with confidence. Even when staff changes occurred on the client side, we were able to keep the process moving, bring new stakeholders up to speed, and maintain momentum without losing the strategic direction of the project.
What we’re particularly proud of is how practical the final solution is. The site looks clean and professional, but it also works hard behind the scenes. Staff can update content without needing a developer, users can navigate more confidently, and the College no longer has to rely on risky on-premises hosting.
The project also reinforced how valuable WordPress can be when it is planned and built properly. With the right structure, permissions, templates, security, and training, it can become a powerful and scalable platform for large, content-heavy organisations.
For us, this project is a strong example of design and development working together to solve real operational challenges. It gave Vermont Secondary College a website that feels current, performs reliably, and supports the school community every day.
Here are a few more projects that showcase how we approach branding, design, and digital with clarity and intention.
