Who has built their school website in Frog Learn?

[S Marcham]

I was wondering if many people had built their school website in Frog Learn and if so wouldn’t mind posting their URL here? I am interested to see what can be achieved.

We have Frog3 and Learn, currently our school website is built in Frog3, which I find very easy to create almost any layout/design. However we are trying to move away from frog3 and I have been looking at creating our website in Learn. I understand you can use an existing  template or download the theme pack and adjust to build your own theme. I downloaded the theme pack and have been trying to recreate our website, but I am finding it very difficult to get the desired layout, as my knowledge of css and html are limited.

Anyway, it would be good to see what others have managed to create, thank you.

[Corinne]

We did. I found a few issues with it, like you said its not as easy to achieve the look you want, it can be done but it takes work. I also found that my designs on my PC matched my mock ups, when sent over to Frog there was some issues in translation it seems as when it was applied it changed a few things  - mainly positioning and sizes. This resulted in us having to get Frog to help us make those things go back to how we needed them. Its also a bit of a pain if things in your theme need changing, for example we have links to web-mail and portal in the header part of our theme, if these links change then we have to request this be done through them so not as instant as editing in Frog 3. This is something I did not think would be an issue at the time. 

 

 

[S Marcham]

Thank you for this information. Did you use the theme.ejs file as your base to design your mock ups? Or did you produce your mock ups another way? Also, what is your school website address please? I would love to have a look. Many thanks.

[Corinne]

Yes I used that and made changes. all mock ups were done in fireworks as images, this was a long project of mine when I began at this school. 

The address is www.bishopschester.co.uk

[S Marcham]

Thank you, looks good, I know how long something like this can take! I think for me it will be getting the menus right, I will persevere.

 

[clangstaff]

www.holmfirthhigh.co.uk

Our website is currently built using FrogLearn the theme is a custom made one by myself and took quite a lot of work though this was created right at the launch of FrogLearn when there weren't many example themes available to customers.

Although the website did fit our needs for some time, overall using FrogLearn gave us a few options...

- A lot of manual work from staff to keep up to date with relevant content and make this look nice on the website

- Website could be updated easily by a numb er of staff members but doesn't look particularly professional

- Website is made up of mainly static content.

Due to the limitations we have with our FrogLearn website we have decided to build a custom website away from Frog. This will give us complete control and flexibility with far less compromise. We will use WordPress for this website.

 

 

[S Marcham]

Hello, thanks for the information and URL, looks good! 

I have also been wondering about using WordPress for the school website, I guess all you need is some webspace? Then download WordPress and start creating?

[clangstaff]

@S Marcham That's right or you could set up a localserver initially and work on there XAMPP is easy to set up and use for this and there is tons of easy guidance online for setting up XAMPP and getting Wordpress set up.

I'd probably advise getting yourself a flexible theme to work with rather than one of the standard themes - I use a theme called 'Divi' below is an example of a site I created for another school using WP and Divi.

www.nhtschool.co.uk

[S Marcham]

Thank you for the useful information, your Wordpress site looks good. I have used Wordpress a little bit but only with the standard themes - whats the difference with a flexible theme? Is it easier to customise? Many Thanks

[clangstaff]

@S Marcham Yes you will find a theme like Divi or Avada tend to come with built in page builders making the themes much easier to customise. 

For example Divi page builder allows you to easily select from around 30 widgets and place them in various column layouts (similar to frog in this sense but with lots more flexibility and customisation).

[THaines]

Hi @S Marcham

We too have Frog3 and FrogLearn and have our website in Frog3 - www.trinitynewbury.org. It serves its purpose at the moment but is very time consuming to update etc. and is now causing issues as it's not mobile friendly and is optimised for IE only. I did try and re-create something similar in FrogLearn but as others have mentioned, I couldn't get the layout right and with next to no knowledge of css and html I couldn't achieve anything near what I wanted. I also looked at WordPress but again it didn't fit our needs.

In the end we decided to go with a true website company, e4education, who we are currently working with to create new websites for us and the other two schools in our trust. It's a very expensive option but definitely worth it if you want a properly, intuitive website which is easy to manage!

Tom