Rugby School Japan
Design and development of a refined and informative website for the Japan branch of the historic boarding school from the UK.
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The brief
Clarence Education Asia, operator of a number of best-in-class British international schools in Japan, approached Tacchi to design and develop the website for its upcoming flagship school: Rugby School Japan, the first ever British boarding school in the greater Tokyo area.
Our key brief was to release the initial version of the site in time for the public announcement of the school, with the core purpose of helping to hit the target number of applications for the first school year starting Autumn 2023.
It was also important that the site helped to attract a diversity of students that met RSJ's criteria for suitability, in addition to helping CEA hire teachers and other staff to run the school.
Design
Our design process focused on the core purpose of maximising applications by carefully structuring the site’s page architecture and responsive page layouts to fit with the variety of device types, information needs, and thought processes of our target audience: parents of prospective students. We also ensured a high level of visual refinement while adhering to Rugby School’s strong brand guidelines.
Due to the short time between the start of the project and the desired release date to coincide with the announcement of the school, we created a project plan in collaboration with the client that would ensure our ability to deliver the initial site on time and within budget.
Development
We developed the site using WordPress, the most popular platform for content-driven websites, and a strong option for long-term maintainability due to the huge and affordable developer community.
Our work involved ensuring that the RSJ team could easily maintain and expand the content of the site without requiring development resources. For this we created a custom section-based templating system and made customizations to WordPress’ standard editor to make creating new pages quick and easy for non-design or technical staff.
After ensuring the site’s code and content were optimized for performance, we published it using WP Engine, a hosting service providing fast servers for worldwide access, easy maintenance, and great customer support while being very cost-effective.
