Designing and building a new site for the Vancouver School Board was an exciting and challenging task. As one of the largest and most diverse public school systems in Canada, the website needed to cater to an equally large and diverse audience. The Vancouver School District includes over 56,000 students from K-12 (speaking 126 different languages!), a full-time adult education program and continuing education throughout the district.

Our goal was to develop a visually-appealing and user-friendly public website that would increase the Vancouver School Board’s profile as a recognized leader in education. To do this, we had to pay special attention to the site’s design and organization to ensure that users could easily find the information they were looking for, while also incorporating all the features necessary for a first-class, modern website.

The new site includes a district-wide events calendar, image gallery, school directory system, and email subscription options. There is also a tagging and categorization system (complete with tag clouds), video capability, and language translation in nine different languages. Accessibility was also an important consideration, so we built the site to make sure it was accessible to mobile users, users with older technology and those who are visually impaired.