Education

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Reid Temple Christian Academy

Overview/Challenge

Located on the campus of Reid Temple AME Church (32 acres) in Glenn Dale, Maryland, Reid Temple Christian Academy (RTCA) is committed to providing a holistic Christian education which ministers to the whole child, mind, body and spirit. RTCA needed to build an informative website that would strike the interest of parents who were interested in providing a higher end education than other schools in the area. The following is an abbreviated list of requirements:

1. For potential parents, the site needed to illustrate the overall school environment, such as courses offered, student to teacher ratio, and the academy's core beliefs. It also needed to serve as a definitive resource to common items such as financial aid forms.
2. Serving the needs of existing parents was just as important to the client. The site needed to inform existing parents of upcoming events and provide answers to frequently asked questions.
3. Despite the amount of information required to serve the needs of new and existing parents, the site needed to be easy to navigate, well-organized, and easy to read. Many parents could potentially use the Internet to find a new school for their children, so the site needed to be completely optimized for search engine indexing.
4. RTCA planned to use an in-house webmaster, so the site needed to be built to a specification that could be modified by any web professional, no matter the level of training.
5. Many staff and faculty members did not have work email addresses through The Academy. Many teachers emailed parents using personal email accounts, creating a disorganized faculty directory.
6. Perhaps the most difficult challenge was the timeframe: With Open House in less than 2 weeks away, their current vendor was non-responsive and unreachable. They did not have immediate access to their primary domain name.

Solution

We knew that we had to work fast tie together the issues accurately. In order to address each issue, we used our full-proof Design Process, streamlining each task to completion. To quickly address all items and to ensure an on-time launch, we recommended the use of a popular open source Content Management System (CMS). The system includes the features:

• Pages that are automatically search engine optimized so that new and existing parents can organically find RTCA via popular search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and Bing.
• Google Analytics for traffic analysis, to closely measure which areas are accessed frequently during marketing campaigns and events.
• Password-protected website administration for secure and instant page management. We trained assigned staff members so that they could quickly update the website without our immediate intervention.

We also provided world-class web hosting on our robust LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) servers for quick and reliable deployment. Building on our servers provided an advantage, as we did not have to contact outside agencies to make configuration changes during installation and development. We were also able to assign as many email accounts as necessary, so that all RTCA personnel could utilize business email via any web browser, email client, or mobile device.

Our Design Team manipulated stock and client-provided materials to build an image and brand consistent with their current marketing material. this included the company logo, video footage, company colors, preferred typeface and more. The website was built to look great no matter the browser, and employed sidebar menus for better organization.

Conclusion

Not only did we meet RTCA's deadline, it has received rave reviews regarding the new website. They are able to monitor traffic and update the homepage as often as necessary. Even newly hired webmasters are able to step in and quickly adapt, because of the administration system's ease of use. All while being easy to use and search engine friendly.