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.

Go check it out.