The ABC International SchoolTwo working prototypes, a full scope, and a plan for taking the ABCIS website to the standard of the strongest independent schools in Britain.
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Seven months of SEO and AI visibility work has put ABCIS in front of far more of the right families. The site they land on is now the weakest part of the journey. This proposal fixes that, and adds something no international school in Vietnam currently offers.
Since the start of our engagement we have been rebuilding how ABCIS is found: search visibility, the way the school is described by AI answer engines, and the quality of the traffic reaching the site. Those results are now showing.
What that surfaces is an uncomfortable truth. A parent researching international schools in Ho Chi Minh City now finds ABCIS more often, compares it against BIS, ISHCMC, AIS and EIS in the same afternoon, and forms an opinion in roughly eight seconds.
Those eight seconds are currently being decided by a WordPress and Elementor site built for a different era. The education behind it is graded Outstanding. The website does not say so.
Elementor page-builder templates, inconsistent spacing and typography across pages
A designed system: one type scale, one grid, one voice, applied everywhere
Small images inside boxes, stock-style layouts, no sense of scale or place
Full-bleed photography of the actual school, at the size the story deserves
Outstanding BSO grade and Cambridge awards buried below the fold
Proof placed where parents decide: results, inspection quotes, destinations
Nine top-level menu items, admissions competing with staff notices
An information architecture built around the parent journey, not the org chart
Nothing happens between accepting a place and the first day of term
The ABCIS Start: a logged-in onboarding journey for every joining family
We looked at the schools ABCIS is measured against by the families it wants: King's College School Wimbledon, Canford, Millfield, Merchiston Castle, Aiglon College and the other top-tier British independents. Five things separate them from everyone else.
Full-bleed, cinematic, and always of real children on a real day. No stock, no clip-art icons, no small pictures in rounded boxes. The image is the headline.
Editorial serif headlines at 80 to 120 pixels, generous white space, short sentences. The page reads like a prospectus, not a brochure site.
Not a wall of text on a buried page. One sentence, given the whole screen, in the Principal's own voice. It is consistently the most-read element on an independent school site.
Inspection verdicts, examination outcomes and university destinations are placed high, stated plainly and never softened into marketing language.
Sections change rhythm: light, then dark, then full-bleed, then editorial. Motion is slow and deliberate. Nothing bounces.
Every top school does the five above. Almost none of them do anything with the six to twelve months between an accepted offer and the first morning of term. That is where ABCIS can lead rather than follow.
Rather than showing you flat mockups, we built both ideas as real, scrollable pages using the school's own photography and the school's own words. Open them on a phone, send them to a colleague, click everything.
A full-screen hero, a message from the Principal given an entire section, the Achieving, Belonging and Caring values built into the architecture of the page, the learning journey from age two to eighteen, inspection quotes, house crests, both campuses and the community's own voices.
A password-protected portal for families who have accepted a place but have not yet arrived. Eight short steps, taken at their own pace, with progress saved: a welcome from the Principal, meeting the teachers, the values and the house system, a day in the life, what your child will learn, a campus tour, life beyond lessons, and getting ready.
Sign in as a parent or as a student to see both versions of the journey.
A complete rebuild, not a reskin. New design system, new information architecture, new content structure, new platform.
A full design system: type scale, grid, colour, motion, photography direction and component library. Every page in the site drawn from the same set of parts, so it stays consistent long after we hand it over.
Information architecture rebuilt around the three audiences that matter: prospective parents, current parents, and prospective staff. Admissions is never more than one click away.
Copy direction and rewriting for the key pages, built on the school's own inspection reports, results and community quotes. Vietnamese language support retained throughout.
We recommend moving off Elementor. It is the single biggest constraint on both design quality and page speed, and it is why the site cannot currently look like the school.
If the board prefers to stay on WordPress, we can deliver the same design on a custom block theme. We will make the case for the headless route, then build whichever the school chooses.
Most school website launches lose visibility for three to six months. That is not an accident of technology, it is an absence of planning. Because we run the SEO and AI visibility programme, the migration is handled by the same people who built the rankings.
A family accepts a place in October. Their child starts the following August. For those ten months, the school is silent and the family is left to worry. That silence is the single largest cause of an accepted place quietly disappearing.
The ABCIS Start turns that gap into the beginning of belonging. Families log in and work through eight short modules at their own pace: meeting the teachers, understanding Achieving, Belonging and Caring, walking an ordinary Tuesday hour by hour, seeing what their child will learn, touring the campus, choosing the clubs they want to try, and ticking off uniform, documents and bus routes as they go.
There is a parent version and a simpler student version, because a ten-year-old moving country has different questions from their parents. Progress is saved, so a family can dip in for five minutes on a Sunday evening across ten months rather than facing a forty-page welcome pack in August.
An accepted place that stays engaged is far harder for a competitor school to take. Every module is a reason to stay committed.
Children who already know the day's rhythm, the building and their teacher's face settle faster. Staff spend the first fortnight teaching, not orienting.
Documents, forms and deadlines are tracked in one place with automatic reminders, instead of chased over email by the office one family at a time.
No international school in Ho Chi Minh City currently offers this. It is a concrete answer to the question every parent asks on a tour: what happens next?
Phase one covers everything above. Buddy family matching, event RSVPs and a returning-family version are natural extensions once the school has seen a first intake through it.
Timings assume the school can turn around feedback within five working days at each review point, and that the photography shoot happens in weeks three and four.
Stakeholder sessions with leadership, admissions and marketing. Parent journey mapping. Full content audit of the existing site. Information architecture and sitemap signed off. Photography art direction and shot list.
Design system and homepage first, then the full page set. Two rounds of revision built in at each stage. Professional photography shoot on both campuses during this window so real imagery lands in the designs, not placeholders.
Front end, CMS schema, bilingual content model, content migration and page assembly. Redirect map built and tested. Staging environment available to the school throughout, so there are no surprises at the end.
Portal design, authentication, the eight modules, progress tracking, parent and student views, admissions dashboard and the notification flow. Content workshop with admissions to fill the modules with the school's own material.
Accessibility and performance audit, cross-browser testing, final content sign-off, launch, and eight weeks of daily search visibility monitoring with weekly reporting.
The website and The ABCIS Start are quoted as a single engagement because they share a design system, a CMS and a content model. Splitting them would cost the school more, not less, and would leave two things that do not feel like one school.
Not included: third party licence fees, video production beyond the Principal's welcome film, and ongoing hosting after the first twelve months. All are quotable separately if wanted.
Invoiced against milestones, payable within fourteen days. Two rounds of revision are included at each design stage. The existing SEO and AI visibility retainer continues unchanged alongside this project and is not affected by it.
“Saigon Digital transformed how Ski.com shows up online. Beyond rebuilding our platform, they helped us rethink our entire search and AI visibility strategy. We saw a significant uplift in organic traffic, our content started appearing in AI-generated travel recommendations, and the quality of inbound leads improved dramatically.”Harry Peisach · CEO, Ski.com · Verified client
We already know ABCIS. Seven months into the search and AI visibility programme, we know your content, your competitors, your technical estate and the families you are trying to reach. No agency starting from scratch can say that, and none of them will carry the risk of the migration the way we will.Saigon Digital · on this engagement
We build premium web platforms and headless CMS architectures, and we work with international schools across Vietnam and the wider region. Our leadership team brings over twenty-five years of combined hands-on international experience to projects exactly like this one.Saigon Digital · saigon.digital/case-studies
Share the two links with the board and the senior team. When you have had a look, we will walk through them together, take the feedback, and firm up a start date.
Nick Rowe · CEO and Co-Founder, Saigon Digital · nick@saigon.digital