Christchurch, NZ ·

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St Bede's College

More than a century of school, behind seven doors.

At Hail · Creative direction with Tim Hewitt

stbedes.school.nz

The St Bede's College menu: a red bar, a charcoal bar with seven sections, and the About Us panel open with History highlighted, above a black-and-white photograph of the old brick college building.
The menu on the live site, opened over the school's History page.

St Bede's began in 1911 in cramped quarters on Ferry Road. This website came 113 years later.

Bishop John Grimes bought the Ferry Road corner in November 1910 for 2,700 pounds and asked the Society of Mary for teachers. The college is named after St Bede, a monk born in Northumbria in 672, and two of its dormitories carry the names of places from his life. The school calls itself the oldest Catholic boys' college in the South Island.

A line drawn to scale on the school's red. 1911, cramped quarters on Ferry Road. 1920, the move to Papanui. 1938, Maurice Dowling starts on the front lawn. 1964, Main North Road goes to four lanes. 1993, a ring road moves the entrance. 2011, the centenary and the earthquakes. 2024, the new site, a thin dark mark at the very end.
The school's years to scale, drawn for this page from its own History and Moments in Time pages. The dark mark at the end is the new site.

The menu

Families choosing a school, boarders, international students and old boys all arrive looking for something different. I built the menu they use. The old site had nine labels, from Home to Community. The new one has seven sections with Faith and Leadership first, and each opens a full-width panel, so you can see what's in a section before you click. Most of the links jump straight to the right part of that section's page.

A red bar above holds the errands: bookings, giving, enrolling, contact and the information hub. Enrolment, the parent and student portal, term dates and facility bookings live in the school's own systems, so the site hands people over to them. I chose Elementor Pro, a visual page builder, for the WordPress build.

Every menu link at once. The red bar: Facility Bookings, Giving at St Bede's, Enrol, Contact, Information Hub. Below it seven columns, from Faith and Leadership to About Us, with their links, including Mana Tāne and History. A grey row lists the links that go out to the school's own systems.
The whole menu as it stands today, laid out at once. Drawn for this page: on the site you open one panel at a time. The grey row isn't part of the menu. It shows where the site hands over.

The pages

I designed the inside pages as a small set of parts that repeat: a big photograph with the page name over it, a card that lifts off the photograph, then panels of picture and text that swap sides as you go down, each with a thin red rule and a heading in Trajan capitals. The cards carry on the line from the home page, Men of Character: Men of Heart, Men of Knowledge, Men of Boarding.

The top of the Living at St Bede's page: a close photograph of a blazer lapel with a brass Boarder badge and red ribbon edging.
The top of Living at St Bede's, on the live site.
A panel from Our Community: hands holding a striped old boys' tie on the left. On the right a red rule, the heading St Bede's College Old Boys' Association, text and a button.
One panel from Our Community. The hands are holding the old boys' tie.
On a phone: text from the Our Marist Values panel on the Faith and Leadership page, above a photograph of silver crosses hanging on black cords.On a phone: an old black-and-white picture of a robed, bearded man, above a red rule and the heading Our History.On a phone: a photograph of the college's brick building through spring trees, above a red rule and the heading Facilities.On a phone: a hockey team in red on floodlit turf, seen from a distance, above a red rule and the heading North West Christchurch Community Sporting Trust.
The same parts on a phone, from the Faith and Leadership, About Us, Living at St Bede's and Our Community pages. The site's language and back-to-top buttons are hidden in these pictures.

Since then

The site has kept taking on more of the school's past. Moments in Time and Bedean Icons were added in 2025 and aren't my work. They sit under About Us beside the history.

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