Witherslack Group

As the leading provider of schools and children's homes for children with special education in the UK, they care about changing the lives of children and young people that they teach and take care of. It’s repaying the trust that parents put in them. And it’s about allowing their staff to shine and make the whole experience extra special.

Strategy
User journey
Design
Development

The business had grown significantly with new schools and homes opening even during lockdown. The vision was to become the leading authority on Specialist Education and Care within the United Kingdom.

To maintain growth and help as many young people as possible, Witherslack asked us to help them streamline their marketing activities by introducing them to new processes and automations and to advise on their marketing strategy with the aim of building a pipeline of new prospects.

We understood that their website sat at the heart of this ambition, seamlessly harnessing technology to build valuable relationships and increase inbound enquiries, answering commercial and recruitment objectives.

In addition to this, Witherslack had a secondary website to manage their recruitment and vacancies, and the challenge was to bring this together with the main website, using third-party access with their recruitment system Networx.

We led a collaboration workshop to identify and dissect audience personas to create defined user journeys, a site map and website goals by audience.

Our design team then led a session to explore the existing brand identity and where, creatively we could go with the designs.

LEWIS have impressed us right from the start with their combined expertise, organisation and creativity. Their ability to interpret and understand, and then turn this insight into a tangible outcome has been fantastic. The end product is not just the delivery and launch of a website that is really delivering for us as an organisation, but also the strong working partnership we now have with them that continues to assist us in moving forward. They are also just great people to work with.
Marketing Manager Greg Deak, Witherslack Group

The results were a whole new set of visual assets, photo treatments and HTML5 animation to bring the site to life. The technical development approach enabled Witherslack to manage their own website and to create engaging content throughout.

This was delivered using Umbraco as the main content management system, alongside custom API integration of the Networx platform for their recruitment and careers section. On the front-end, the Vue.js framework was used to provide targeted interactive components for the site, and third-party systems such as CookieBot, HubSpot, and Google Tag Manager were integrated for further control over the site and to provide data for the in-house marketing department.