Sandvox Website Profile: “Multiple Intelligence School”

We provide a progressive holistic education in the capital of Fiji. We feature small class sizes and we have a strong 'family' atmosphere. We believe that our goal is to lay the foundation for the adults who will live, work and lead in tomorrow's world with broad intelligence, lateral and creative thinking, compassion and a sense of responsibility to our social and environmental world.

Mainly parents who are interested in a progressive education for their child. There are other parties that are also interested particularly in the area of applying the theory of Multiple Intelligences in a Pacific educational context.

It's hard to know if we have advantages because the competitors are very small and to be honest, they aren't much to write home about. I think that our web site probably has a richness and depth that the competitors don't have. That's been possible because we've been able to evolve and extend the web site with time, rather than start from scratch every time we build something more substantial.

I'm sure that a professional web designer would chastise us for this 'hodge-podge' approach but our core business is doing the actual teaching. We don't have the luxury of getting a 100% perfect site. On the other hand we do want to aspire to a minimum sense of professionalism because we think that potential parents do make a judgement about the quality of education we offer based on the look of the web site. It's the same when one receives a business card, this is often the first impression that parents have of us.

Our biggest surprise is that, aside from word of mouth, our web site is our biggest lead generator in terms of introducing us to new potential parents. Ex-pats coming to work for Fiji find us seemingly quite quickly. However, we've been surprised at the number of parents within Fiji who've learned about us through the web site.

Potentially clean design - I've made it probably too messy with too many pagelets. It's a function of trying to do too much on one page. It's on my 'to do' list.

I cannot claim that I used any special tricks and so on on this particular site. However, many people have remarked 'how clever' I am to have incorporated YouTube videos and the like on the page. I like the way that our front page can link to features on our Facebook page (which is dormant until our teacher is back from maternity leave), the blog that I maintain and that this keeps the page changing at least a little bit.