Promoting a Sixth Form College

Barton Peveril College are a Sixth Form college based in Eastleigh, Hampshire. The college has a full-time student body of over 3,000 and attracts students from all over southern Hampshire.

We’ve been working with the marketing team at Barton Peveril since 2011 developing and maintaining the website for the college. We’ve been working on a new version of the site during 2021. The impetus for the new design came from a need to feature larger images and upgrade the layout to a newer framework.

The site is built on WordPress Multisite and has been built to make it easy for the marketing team to manage and extend the content. We’ve embraced the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, so the layouts are more flexible than ever. Features in the site include a friendly, approachable design that makes a feature of the great photography available. A responsive carousel on the home page that is easy to edit and update. An easy to navigate course area, with a fun accordion submenu. We’re also proud of our layout for the college calendar, a small detail, but one we love.

Technical Notes

To jump into some of the technical detail for this build, we used Bootstrap 5 for the framework. We’ve had great results using this as a starting point for projects. As usual a number of great plugins are used to keep the site ticking over, these include Gravity Forms, the Members plugin, Download Monitor and the always excellent Yoast SEO for optimising content. This version of the site features a number of block plugins, including Editor Plus and Getwid.