Growing Together: Blackhawk Christian School’s New Private School Website Redesign Keeps Them Connected to the Community
Blackhawk Christian School has been an Edlio client since 2020, and in January 2022 they launched their newly redesigned website.
Blackhawk Christian School
At-a-glance
Location: Fort Wayne, IN
School Type: Private
Population: 846 Students
Age Group: K-12
Goals
Include mobile-responsive navigation features
Use the newsletter feature for family outreach
Feature social media channels on the website
Utilize spotlight news & teacher page features
THE CHALLENGE
Streamlined Upgrades
When choosing a school website company, the best case scenario is that you can find a company that meets your current needs without overwhelming you but also has the capacity to offer more features when you’re ready to grow. For Blackhawk Christian School (BCS), their newly redesigned website from Edlio did just that.
Maryanne Rich is an IT Specialist at BCS, and she explains the reason for their new website redesign: “The upgrade made it so that we could put our navigation bar and two buttons on the side of the website that stayed in position when viewing on a phone. It made it more mobile-responsive, and our parents have been very happy for the change,” she says.
GOAL
Bringing the Community Home to the Website
Partnering with Edlio has given Blackhawk Christian School an opportunity to use their school website as the centralized hub for important information for the school community. As Maryanne explains, “you can do all kinds of things that make it so that your website is the center and everything comes out from that, so parents can count on where to find the information that they need and they're able to find it easily.” Having a website that is easy to navigate makes it so that parents always know where to go for reliable information, and they don’t have to try to fill in those gaps on their own.
The staff at Blackhawk Christian School also uses outreach methods, built right into their CMS platform, to drive traffic back to the website. One strategy they employ is to create regular parent newsletters. Maryanne says, “it’s very user-friendly for us, creating the newsletters, because we can pull from the website—the data and the formatting that we have already put together.” She adds that this benefit extends to the newsletter readers as well. “Our parents like staying connected and it makes it so that they don't have to go to the website to see those things. They can just click on the newsletter and look at what they need to know,” Maryanne adds.
They have also incorporated social media into their school marketing strategy. “One of the things that we did before our redesign and after our redesign is to keep our social media showing up on the bottom of the website. We're getting a lot of positive feedback from that because families don't have to log into their Facebook or their Twitter to see what's going on in the school, they can just go look at the bottom of the website; so that's been great,” Maryanne offers. Social media outreach should always drive traffic back to your website, so if families know they only have to look in one place—your website—then that’s what they’re going to do.
RESULTS
An Easy-to-Update Private School Website
In Edlio, Blackhawk Christian School has found an educational technology company that provides all the features they need, with room to grow. Maryanne’s favorite parts about her Edlio website are the News features and the ease of back-end updates. “We feel like Edlio’s platform has a lot to offer; we can do teacher pages, and the spotlight news is really great. It's nice to have everything in one place for parents to go see,” Maryanne explains.
On the back end, Edlio’s clear navigation makes it easy for educators to update the website without significant technology training. “We really like the ability to edit our information on pages, and it's very easy to upload attachments and pictures; it makes the design process go much smoother,” Maryanne says.
Final Thoughts
Maryanne and the rest of the Blackhawk Christian School staff know that they can count on Edlio for support whenever they need it, though their website runs smoothly enough that they rarely do. “We haven't needed tech support, so that speaks well of the redesign,” Maryanne says.
She adds,
“the Edlio team has always been very helpful to us; we have always gotten the answers we need and the redesign went very smoothly. We've just always had a very positive experience.”