We succeeded in reinventing the college's website in a visually exciting way – despite a limited budget. The two most exciting challenges for us in this project were learning to work with a very visually-minded client and producing a great website in spite of the limited resources.
What did the client want?
The college wanted to replace their existing site with something completely new. The new website should stand out visually, with a fresh, modern design, to appeal to potential students: the main target group.
The backend should be as intuitive as possible to enable college staff to maintain site content self-sufficiently. Finally, from the start it was clear that the budget for this project would be limited, since the school is publicly funded.
Our role in the project
Meeting requirements within predefined limits – whether it be it terms of budget, timeframe, ... – can be challenging, but precisely these limitations can also drive creativity and often lead to the best results.
In this case we opted to purchase and visually adapt an existing website template, which helped keep costs for the project down. We also encouraged the client to prioritise their requirements for the website, which allowed us to focus on the most important ideas and streamline things further.
Technically the website isn't complex, and so from a development perspective the project was straightforward, however a lot of thought was put into making creative the use of colour and the photographic material available.
Project highlights
1. Full-page background image
By using a black and white photograph as the page background we were able to offset the relative simplicity of the rest of the page content effectively. The textured filter used on the background image adds to the young and modern feel of the page.
2. Colours & fonts
The city of Munich requires the usage of a specific shade of red, and so we combined this with primarily monochrome colours and a lesser known font (Raleway) to create a visually memorable web design, despite its relative simplicity.
Our conclusion
Wherever possible our goal is to exceed client expectations, and of course it's our job, and responsibility, to make sure that the final website will meet the client's needs.
It took a little while to find a 'shared language' with the client, however once that was achieved the project was productive, creative and a lot of fun. The final results certainly went beyond what the college had expected, and the site has been in very active use since then.
What the client said...
"The main challenge with the website was the design component: to present the school and the hairdressing/cosmetics as areas of study in a 'stylish way', while complying with the requirements of the City of Munich and at the same time not exceeding the budget. All of these requirements were met by joom.team in close cooperation with us. The project management proved to be very efficient and all deadlines were met. The reactions after the launch exceeded our expectations and even encouraged other schools to plan to relaunch their own websites."
Christian Baumann, School Director
Munich College for Hair & Beauty
About the client
The roots of the school go back to the 19th century, when Munich hairdressers founded the first vocational training college for their profession. In 2003 courses were added to train to become a beautician/cosmetician. Currently it is the largest school in Bavaria in this field.