Wellington College — intranet and website

Wellington College, one of the great British public schools, is an independent co-educational boarding and day school for 13 to 18 year olds, situated in Berkshire, UK, about 35 miles south west of London.

“We have been using Firefly.NET for some years now, and I'm very happy that we made just the right decision. We have found that content creation is no more difficult than word processing.” Derek Grainge, Webmaster and Maths Teacher

Wellington approached us looking to create a new website to showcase the school to prospective and existing parents alike.  The school were keen to get across their vibrancy and ambition, as well as their holistic approach to education.  We provided a designer and photographer to help capture this ethos and turn it into an attractive website.

Several designs were put to the head master, Dr Anthony Seldon, and other staff, and with their feedback, a final design was chosen and the website implemented.  The Firefly system was installed while the design was still being finalised, but Wellington could still begin building the content for the site.

Using Firefly.NET's powerful news publishing functionality, Wellington built the front page as a showcase of recent events at the school, keeping it looking fresh and up to date. 

The flexible template system came in handy for the school's 150th birthday when the look and feel for the website was entirely changed to fit the 150th branding.  All that was required was a change to the template and all pages on the site were automatically re-branded.

Wellington also use their Firefly.NET installation to run an extensive intranet, allowing members of staff and pupils to easily share learning materials.  Each department is responsible for its area on the intranet meaning that content can be owned and managed by its creator rather than having to be passed to a third party to be "uploaded" on to the intranet. The integration of Firefly.NET with the existing users and groups in the Active Directory impressed Wellington as it made this distributed ownership much easier to implement.

The intranet is used as the central home page within the school and also acts as a portal to other web based services for staff and pupils