New Site Published – St Bede’s College

The new web site for my daughter’s school, St Bede’s College has finally gone live today. This is great news! It is a much better looking replacement for their old site and will give a much needed boost to their on-line presence.

Of course, it is built completely on WordPress, with a ton of plugins, a couple of custom widgets, an original design by an ex pupil, and a fairly sophisticated theme by me. I’ll give more details shortly. It should look OK in most browsers. I’d appreciate a comment if anyone spots any major breakage.

The hardest part (or at least the part that took me the most time) was converting their old pages which were written as old-school 90’s stylee static pages — chock full of presentational HTML — into Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) ones. As far as I can tell every page nowvalidates as XHTML 1.0 strict.

The small team of staff members who have helped me design the architecture of the site, up date the content, and add new stuff, have done a marvellous job. Especially whilst coping with all that goes on at the beginning of a new school year.

Screen shot of St Bede's College website

Go check it out.

Aspiring Artist Kate

K8, Jan’s niece and a really talented artist, has just had a story about her latest college project published in the Manchester Evening News: Skeleton key to art success.

…after weeks of sketching and planning she completed the incredible model in just 11 days.

“I generally do have a freaky kind of style to my work,” said Kate. “My family and friends joke that I am not right and need help. But I’m probably the most happy, jolly person you will ever meet – so I don’t know where it comes from.”

Kate and her skeleton

Image © M.E.N. media 2008

“Kate is a very talented individual who could really go places,” said Mr Sutton “When she first talked about making the skeleton I did wonder whether she would be able to pull it off. Technically it’s very competent. It’s outstanding.

Well done K8, you deserve the recognition.