Institut Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, a state school that changes technology without losing its archive

Institut Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia is a state school in Sant Joan Despí that has been running since the 1977/78 school year: almost fifty years and three buildings. It teaches ESO, baccalaureate, three families of vocational training and transition programmes, and describes itself as a plurilingual, internationalising school. Its website had spent eleven years on Drupal, with a subtheme built to measure for the school.

A secondary school does not have one audience: it has two. Families are after the notice about textbooks or the canteen, and students are after Moodle before the bell goes; in between there are eleven sections of information — studies, the school office, departments, projects — that nobody should have to walk through to find a date.

We built the home page like the noticeboard by the front door. Open procedures first — available places, virtual queue — then the log-ins used every day (XTEC, Moodle, iEduca, email, intranet) and only then the introduction to the school. Below that, the term’s highlights — textbooks, lockers, canteen — in five identical cards: photo, headline and button.

We moved eleven years of Drupal to WordPress without losing a date. 119 pages, 284 posts and 2,122 media files, with their original dates and paths: there are documents that still read July 2014. The school was not rewritten from scratch, it was moved whole.

We ordered ten sections and three menu levels. Institut, Estudis, Secretaria, Actualitat, Projectes, Departaments, Coordinació TIC, AFA, Empresa and Contacte. Each stage has its own noticeboard in the school office, the school documents go out as PDFs, the floor plans go floor by floor, and there is an inbox for the companies that host work placements.

One single red, the one on the crest. #DA251C rules the header, the buttons, the links and the active menu item; the rest is paper grey, almost square corners and a 16/28 body meant for long texts. In the footer, the mandatory badges of the Departament, the ERDF and the Recovery Plan.

A school website is not judged on its home page. It is judged on whether a family can find the notice about the lockers without picking up the phone. That is why the first thing on the screen is not who we are, but what is open today: the procedures with a deadline at the top, and the history of the school — which is long and good — one screen further down.