Rebuilding Gripsholmsskolan's Website From the Ground Up

Gripsholmsskolan is an independent school in Mariefred, a short walk from Gripsholm Castle and the shore of Lake Mälaren. Founded in 2009, it teaches around 480 children from preschool class to year 9, with a philosophy built on three words: hjärna, hjärta, hälsa. Brain, heart, health.

It's a school with a clear identity and a lot to be proud of. Its website, until recently, didn't show any of that.

This summer we redesigned and rebuilt the whole thing. Here's what we found, what we changed, and why it matters for a school.

What we started with

The old site had been running on the same WordPress theme for well over a decade. It was built before phones became the main way people browse, so there was no mobile layout at all: on a phone you got the desktop page shrunk down, and you pinched and zoomed your way around it.

The bigger problem was structure. Over the years, everything the school had ever written had been added to the menu. Policies, curricula, old quality reports, evacuation plans, internal routines. We counted more than sixty links in the navigation. All of it was there, and none of it was findable. A parent trying to answer a simple question, how do I apply, was competing with a 2017 quality report for attention.

None of this was anyone's fault. It's what happens to every website that gets added to for fifteen years without ever being taken apart and put back together.

Starting over, on purpose

We didn't refresh the old site. We rebuilt it from scratch in Framer, starting with the question of who actually visits a school website and what they need.

The answer is short: parents deciding whether to apply, parents of current pupils looking for news and contacts, and people who want to work there. Everything on the new site is organised around those three visitors.

Sixty-plus menu items became a handful: about the school, news, the stages from preschool to year 9, contact, and a bright, always-visible button to apply for a place. The content that mattered was rewritten and moved into pages that make sense. The content that didn't matter to a visitor was left out. The site is now seventeen focused pages instead of a sprawl, and there's a search bar in the header for anyone who wants to jump straight to something.

The improvements that matter most

A proper application page. Admissions is the single most important job a school website has. The new page explains the admission criteria for the preschool and the school side by side, makes it clear that one application covers both (they share a queue), and sends parents straight to the form. It also says, plainly, what parents should know about applying to an independent school alongside a municipal one.

News the school runs itself. The Aktuellt section is a proper content system. Staff add a post, it appears on the news page, the latest ones show up on the homepage, and the headline runs in a red ticker under the hero. No developer needed, no waiting.

A clear picture of the stages. Preschool, after-school care (fritids) and the F to 9 school each have their own page, so a parent can see how the whole journey fits together, from the first day of preschool to the last day of year 9.

People, not just an organisation chart. A staff directory with contact details per person, a jobs page with a substitute list for people who want to help out, and the headteacher's own words about what the school is trying to do.

The legal side, done properly. Swedish schools have obligations that most websites bury or skip: a complaints procedure, a whistleblowing channel under the 2021 act, a support fund so no child misses a trip for financial reasons, and a GDPR policy. Each now has its own clear page, written for a parent rather than a lawyer.

It works on a phone. Every page is built for mobile first, because that's where most parents will read it, often in the school car park.

Search engines get a proper site too

A school doesn't compete for search traffic the way a business does, but it still needs to be found. When a family moving to Mariefred types "friskola Mariefred" into Google, the school should be the first thing they see, and the result should say something useful.

So every page on the new site has its own title and description written by hand, a clean readable address, a proper social preview image for when it's shared, and a sitemap that tells Google exactly what exists. It's the unglamorous groundwork that most sites of this kind never get, and it's the reason the school now shows up looking like a school rather than a list of policy documents.

What happens next

A school's year has a rhythm: term start, applications, holidays, graduation. A website should follow it. We're staying on after launch to look after the site, keep it running, and help the school keep it alive rather than let it go quiet again. The best websites we build are the ones that are still changing a year later.

The bottom line

Gripsholmsskolan didn't need a bigger website. It needed a smaller, clearer one that put the right things in front of the right people, worked on a phone, and could be updated by the people who run the school. That's what it has now.

Have a look at gripsholmsskolan.se.

We're Filip & Philip, a Swedish digital studio based in Mariefred. We design, build, and look after websites for schools, organisations, and businesses that need to be understood quickly. If your site has grown into a sprawl, send it over and we'll tell you, honestly, where we'd start.