Johnstown Christian School: a site for families and the community

Johnstown Christian School provides Christ-centered education for families in the Johnstown, Pennsylvania region. It teaches students from preschool through elementary, middle school and high school, and offers bus transportation.

What the site has to do

A school site has more audiences than most. Prospective families want to understand the school and how to enroll. Current parents need calendars, supply lists, lunch menus, handbooks and a login to the student information system, usually in a hurry. Alumni and supporters want news and ways to give. The site has to keep all of those within reach without becoming a maze.

What’s on the site

• A homepage built around four themes, each with its own photo and link: preparing lives, engaging minds, building character and deepening faith.
• A school facts section.
• Events and announcements pulled from the school’s Google Calendar, plus the latest news.
• A “Join the JCS family” section that starts the enrollment process.
• A Parents menu with the parent calendar, the school calendar, supply lists, breakfast and lunch, flyers and documents, handbooks, volunteering, yearbooks, college and career information and a login link for the student information system.
• About pages covering the mission, history, faculty and staff, governance, accreditation and employment.
• Admissions, academics, student life, events and support pages, plus alumni and contact.

The school’s blue and green colors run through the header and menu bars, and the menus are deep but well grouped. On a phone, the same content sits behind a slide-out menu, so a parent can get to the calendar in a couple of taps.

What E-3 did

E-3 designed and built the site. E-3 hosts Johnstown Christian School on managed WordPress hosting. Our monitoring checks the site for available updates and known plugin vulnerabilities, so we can catch issues early, ideally before parents checking the calendar notice anything.

The site runs on WordPress with the Genesis framework and the Dynamik child theme, with Beaver Builder pages. Toolset handles structured content, and Simple Calendar displays events straight from Google Calendar, so staff update one calendar and the website follows.