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Client
Lentiz Education Group consists of 14 schools on different levels, preparing 7500 students for a career in the green and agricultural sector. Lentiz students are being prepared for the future and encouraged to bring up the best out of themselves. The new website radiates that.
Challenge
Build a coherent and encouraging website for a large and diverse audience, being maintained by 15 separate divisions
14 schools, a sharpened vision, a list of requirements, a functional design, an interaction design and an interface design. The only thing still missing: a developer. That’s where we came in. In cooperation with BOOM Strategy - responsible for the design and the strategic process within Lentiz - Slik built the new website for Lentiz and its 14 schools.
The result: 1 WordPress Multisite interface, 1 custom theme, 15 color schemes, 1 corporate website, 14 school websites and a classroom full of trained web editors.
USER FRIENDLY
Flexible content blocks thanks to Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
Slik provided the technical team for the rollout of this project. We were also tasked to research and build a solution that helps all web editors from Lentiz to do their work in a user-friendly Wordpress environment.
Alongside with Lentiz and BOOM, we discussed all design components. Does a web editor want every page to be flexible? Or is there also a need for more guidance in building the content? We considered if a component should be flexible or be more set in stone in a template. This resulted in a balance between templates and flexible content blocks that helps web editors to create their own custom landing pages, while sticking to the design system.
What do flexible blocks actually mean? Every Wordpress installation we make is custom-made from the ground up. We achieve this using Wordpress plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). With ACF we change the classic editor of WordPress to a flexible grid of flexible content blocks. In other words: a component which web editors can create custom pages freely. This makes a theme more widely usable and the website easily expandable.
WordPress Multisite
1 design, 15 websites, 15 color schemes in 1 environment: WordPress Multisite
Lentiz Education group consists of 14 schools. Each school has their own website for communicating with students, but especially for recruiting new students. When Lentiz upgrades their website to a new one, then automatically 15 new sites (including the corporate website) have to be built. Each school wants to maintain their own (corporate) identity and make use of their own color schemes. And at the same time, there needs to be a level of recognition. So a design was created that works for every school. With every school having their own color scheme.
With a sharp vision, list of requirements, functional design, interaction design and interface design in the pocket we decided to make one single, yet super flexible theme within a WordPress Multisite environment. The WordPress Multisite environment ensures that all websites operate within one WordPress environment and allows the management to take place in one location.
Thanks to the role-structure, web editors only have access to the website of their own school. Slik trained the web editors, so that they can keep the website of their school up to date.
Technology
Custom WordPress website with strong security
For the realisation of the websites we made use of the technologies HTML, CSS (BEM), Javascript (JQuery, Vue.js) and PHP. Naturally, we write our code in a semantic and logical structure. To create the correct balance between loading speed and quality of the images, we use compressed images and .svg for illustrations. With help of WP Super Cache we turn a dynamic WordPress-page into static html-files. Offering static pages is much quicker and demands less capacity of the server.
The site runs on WordPress. WordPress is the industry standard, and therefore a popular target among hackers. That’s why we emphasise on security by adding a software firewall (ModSecurity), a hardware firewall (Forgitate Cluster) to protect against DDos-attacks, A+ ranking SSL-certificates A+, security headers and more.
Slik has built a solid foundation that is built to last, by creating a custom Wordpress implementation. We strongly recommend not using standard themes, because this is a source of security problems. Same goes for many Wordpress plugins out there. We use as little plugins as possible, we check plugins for security compatibility and keep all plugins up to date.
