SCHOOL SPOTLIGHT

Aiglon College

Aiglon College, a leading international boarding school at the foot of the Swiss Alps, has always focused on a holistic approach to education by bringing together students from diverse countries, backgrounds, and cultures.

With more than 65 nationalities represented, 85% of Aiglon’s students live on campus and learn among friends they otherwise may never meet in their home country. At Aiglon, students learn to see the world through different views, share ideas, and work together. This commitment to diverse, global perspectives became the foundation for Aiglon’s award-winning website redesign.

“Our global and local community is really important to us,” shared Seth Barker, associate director of communications at Aiglon College. “Our parent community, like our students, comes from all over the world, which is wonderful, but it also means very different cultural and linguistic expectations of how you engage with the school.”

At a Glance

Aiglon College is a private, co-ed boarding school, founded in 1949 at a scenic location in the alpine village of Chesieres. The school prepares its students for IGCSE exams and the IB Diploma, and is known for its extensive outdoor education program and winter sports, including mountaineering, and other outdoor challenges.

The global perspective extended to the school's website, but it hadn’t been redesigned in almost a decade. Launching a new website was a chance to represent its brand with the input of many of the key stakeholders, and while each group added its own insights, bringing these perspectives together was essential to creating a site that speaks to the entire community, not just one audience.

Collecting Stakeholder Buy-in

For Aiglon’s new website, however, the goal wasn’t to make a site just for admissions or marketing purposes but to create an online space that reflects the depth and character of the entire Aiglon community, a proud group of teachers, students, and more than 6,000 alumni and parents dating back 75 years.

“Any school has a complex network of stakeholders that have a vital interest in the school, and your website is expected to be at the center,” Barker said. “It's a central hub of how all community members, including our alumni spread around the world, will be engaging with all of the people.”

Barker explained that the redesign team prioritized understanding their community and stakeholder groups, using the website to engage with Aiglon's broader mission and strategy. For Aiglon’s redesign, they’d need to align the design with the school’s overall strategic goals.

“You need to convince people that your website deserves the investment,” he said. “It’s not solely focused on admissions and lead generation and the marketing funnel, but it's also about the role that your website serves in the ethos of your community. How is it working for you across the world, and how is it advancing what you want to achieve as an institution?”

“The stakeholders, the people, the communities—those who are the real people behind, within, and outside your organization, so you can’t think about what your institution is trying to achieve if you're not considering how it's sitting with these different people.”

“Whether you've got a website you want to develop...or whether you're going to your senior leaders to pitch it, that's why you need to work with Finalsite — it's a central role to your institution and how you represent yourselves...Your brand will thank you.”

SETH BARKER
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Aligning Brand Identity with Community Feedback

Barker knew the site needed to be a functional resource that was useful for day-to-day needs, admissions, and fundraising goals. Ultimately, Barker and his team sought to turn the website into a space that reflected Aiglon’s mission and values as a whole. That required careful planning and engagement with each stakeholder group to create a digital presence that was not only inviting to prospective families but also representative of Aiglon’s commitment to diversity, global perspective, and community.

From Black to Blue | Engaging Alumni for Design Input

When designing the website, it was essential to consider how it would resonate with each stakeholder, especially alumni with strong ties to the school’s identity. While the team initially chose a bold, modern look, some alumni felt disconnected from this new aesthetic.

ailgon college website mockup old and new

Aiglon encountered this firsthand with feedback from an alumnus, now an editor at a prominent national news publication in the US, who questioned the use of black as a dominant color on their redesigned website, feeling it clashed with the school’s longstanding identity.

By listening and responding to alumni input, Aiglon’s communications team honored its commitment to its community’s voices. Ultimately, they chose a darker blue that not only looked visually appealing but better represented the school’s heritage and alumni base.

“The change really captured our history as a school, and it allowed us to bring back the more traditional color that was associated with our school for quite a while,” Barker said.

“But even more importantly, our alum felt heard. If you get it right, it can have trickle-down effects that you didn't anticipate in setting up your brand, potentially many years into the future.”

Barker suggested engaging the people who can give insight and combining that with the site analytics to understand your redesign goals. “We need the data and the surveys, but don't let that get in the way of the personal touch,” he warned. “It's that personal communication that can really drive the difference.”

Pressed for Answers | Supporting the Media's Role in Amplifying Stories

A school website also plays a vital role in communicating information to the media, making it essential to provide timely, accurate, and compelling content that aligns with the school's narrative.

“If your stakeholder is a governor, an alum, or a student that's coming to your site, they need to be able to see everything that’s happening, even if they don't know what's been happening,” said Baker. “Is your school ‘legitimate’ in the wide view of stakeholders?”

Aiglon recognized this during a recent campus event displaying Manchester City’s trophies, which attracted attention from local journalists. Although a reporter under deadline couldn’t find the time to conduct an interview before publishing, he was able to turn to Aiglon’s website, where he found detailed, up-to-date content and quotes about the school’s partnership with Manchester City.

“Journalists, the media, people who have nothing to do with your school, if they need information about you, where are they going to go?” asked Baker. “They're going to come to your website, and if you're not talking about anything else that's going on in the life of your school, and if people need to be able to access that information, what are they going to make up?”

By maintaining its hub of news and editorial pieces on the site, Aiglon ensured that the media could present an accurate story aligned with the school’s message. That content, easily found across Aiglon’s site thanks to Finalsite Post’s ability to ‘create once, publish everywhere,’ has been a key aspect of Aiglon’s website content strategy.

“We want our website to be a hub of information across the organization and stakeholder groups,” explained Baker. “We publish our editorials not only as website news stories, but we integrate them into newsletters and add them into our staff portal.”

Baker stressed that more than any other attribute of a brand's DNA, stakeholders need to know and resonate with what you represent.

“Whether it's a good news story or the next crisis, having content on a website and thinking about those stakeholders beyond people who are directly in your community will help. You can build trust by having a website that says, ‘We're interested in what's going on in the world,’ and it expresses that brand leadership in a really important way.”

Internal Resources | Creating a Portal for Staff Engagement

A well-designed website should engage external stakeholders and serve internal audiences, like faculty and staff, by creating a central hub for essential resources and information. However, Aiglon knew it needed more than a storefront window—it needed to give its people reasons to return to the website.

“A portal is something we had thought about from the very beginning of our website conception,” Baker said, asking questions about its role, how it would segment other audiences, and what kind of content it would offer.

For Aiglon, implementing a staff portal transformed how employees accessed and engaged with internal content. Before the site’s launch, scattered staff resources made it challenging for team members to stay connected. However, the new portal quickly became the third most visited section of Aiglon’s site, providing a convenient and reliable source for important information that keeps staff informed and connected.

“There are always things that need tending to,” Baker said, comparing a school’s website and a garden that needs regular attention.

“You don't just get to launch your website and then say, ‘Great, I'll go check on it in three years and see if everything is going okay.’ It needs constant cultivation to make something effective if you're eating out of your garden, but also something that's beautiful to look at and tells your story.”

Since the site launch

2

International & European Design Awards

since the site went live

68%

Increase

in organic traffic since the launch of the site

Building Trust with the Experts in the Community

Today, Aigon’s site is reaching more users than ever, gaining a 68% increase in organic traffic since its launch. The site won gold as a Best of CASE Europe Region Award, and also won gold at the Vega Awards, an international competition recognizing and celebrating excellence in websites, marketing, and other digital communications.

“It’s about building trust as an institution,” Barker said. “Whether you've got a website you want to develop, like a garden, or whether you're going to your senior leaders to pitch it, that's why you need to work with Finalsite.”

“It's a central role to your institution and how you represent yourselves. It's a story of listening to your stakeholders and thinking about the experts in your community.”

“Your brand will thank you.”

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