Mountain Middle School Website
a small website (uncoded) project by jwitchel

Creative brief

The buyer added updates to the brief. Read them.

Business Name

Mountain Middle School

What do you do?

We are a middle school in Durango, Colorado, USA. (That's 6th grade - 9th grade or ages 10 - 13)

Do you have a desired website screen size?

1024x768

How many pages (maximum of 4) do you need designed?

Three. Homepage, Content Page, Gallery Page

What is your industry?

Education and Universities

Describe the target audience for your website design

The target audience is specifically parents of children attending the school and parents of prospective students attending schools. The audience is mostly women, but some dads too. Durango is composed of families where a college education is prevalent and people who are dedicated to the outdoors. It's a town of about 20,000 and in rural Colorado (we are seven hours from Denver). There is skiing, mountainbiking, more hiking trails than I can count and a beautiful river that runs through the valley here. Income is all over the map, but how much you make is also a lot less important here than in other parts of America. Parents viewing this website are aspirational for their kids. They are thinking about the next steps in their education and this school is one option. They want their kids to be happy and well educated.

What 3 things would you like to communicate to your audience through your website design

1) This is a "Project Based Learning" school. That's a key buzz word that needs to go front an center
2) This is a _Fun_ school. (Fun meaning enjoyable, motivated, upbeat place to go to school)
3) This is a _Good School_. Academics are important. We do well in school.

How is your company different from your competitors?

The schools we want to distinguish ourselves from are http://miller.durangoschools.org/ and http://escalante.durangoschools.org/ which as you can see from the designs are templated from the same district-owned website. These are the big local public school options.

We are a new school and a charter school and first and foremost we are a "Project Based Learning" school. The classroom sizes are smaller, the community is more engaged and we emphasize academic achievement.

Visually we want to distinguish the website with a brightness and a friendliness that doesn't come through on the other sites.

What website design styles do you like?

The good news is there is remarkable concensus on the designs we like:
http://www.ucla.edu/ -- this is everyone's favorite site by a longshot. **We want a similar look and feel**
http://www.brown.edu/ -- this is #2
http://www.harvard.edu/ and http://www.stanford.edu/ closely follow

What colors do you want to see in your website design?

#F68B1F
#212020

What colors do you NOT want to see in your website design?

You can use anything

What adjectives should best describe your website design?

Focusing on the UCLA website which was a great reference site for us: big and splashy. Bright and flooded with colors from the outdoors. Cheerful and friendly. This is a recruiting tool that we want parents to say "hey I think my child might like being here".

In contrast to Miller and Escalante websites: Lots of whitespace and an open layout.

What content must be included in the website design?

We want some big nice pictures. To make that easy for you, you can drop in pictures from any stock library. Upon acceptance of your design, we will shoot photos of our school and our children to match the composition of the photos you select.

If you want to use photography from Durango, CO just do a search -- Durango is a beautiful place and we can swap out or reshoot any photos that we can't get licenses for.

See the attached layout for all the required links and footer.

Do you have additional requirements or links you want to share?

This is our current homepage... http://www.mountainmiddleschool.org/

A quick note on the Yeti drawing: One of the children drew this and it was used on a t-shirt last year so it's slowly becoming their mascot. If you want to clean it up and incorporate it, that's great but it's not a requirement.