City of Grand Haven, New Client - Juniper
Working with the Coast Guard City USA was one of our highlights of the season, not only because we've been long-time partners with Grand Haven Public Schools, among other organizations in the area, but it was an excellent opportunity to continue showing how the Foxbright CMS can excel in sectors well beyond the schoolyard. With scalability a primary feature of our system, we've spread our reach to medical centers, nonprofits, and other organizations. Over the years our proprietary tools, while tailored to the needs of educational institutions, have proven to be the building blocks required for a range of industries.
With the City of Grand Haven, we dove into the beautiful Lake Michigan setting of the city and proved how flexible our designs can truly be. Through wavy graphical elements, targeted spotlight stylings, and flipping the column tab sections into a new structure, even I would have a hard time guessing the City of Grand Haven was based on the Juniper design.
Project Highlights
- Myriad Spotlight Stylings providing quick access points to city services, resources, partnerships, and events.
- Deep navigation architecture accommodating the scope required of a City website, while maintaining ease-of-use.
- Refactoring of Juniper's 3-column tab layout to accommodate unique tab-based sections.
Three Rivers Community Schools, New Client - Juniper
One thing we learned working with the team at Three Rivers Community Schools (TRCS) was their emphasis on pride and collaboration . Building TRCS' new website was a massive effort bringing a large amount of input and feedback from their collective staff and community. After much refinement and revision, the TRCS take on the Juniper design reflects their district identity while meeting the diversified needs surfaced through their stakeholder input. Having been on their former website platform for many years, no attention to detail was spared in delicately migrating their formerly vast sitemap into a consistent and unified experience, improving navigability without sacrificing the breadth of resources and programs offered.
Project Highlights
- Restructuring of Building and Department pages to maintain consistency and compliance.
- Emphasis on TRCS' strong values and community engagement.
- Full utilization of Foxbright's district branded app and mass notifications to unify communication channels between staff, families, and the broader community.
Oak Design
Our newest design offering is picking up steam and dropping acorns this fall (sorry Henny Penny, watch out for foxes) with two new partner implementations! Oak's defining elements include a left-side main navigation designed to always be a click away while allowing more content to appear above the fold by saving header space. Add animated content delivery and space-efficient tab areas, Oak has become one of our more unique designs to date.
Crest USD 479, New Client - Oak
Hailing from Colony, KS, we are proud to knight the Lancers into the Foxbright realm! After outgrowing their previous, more DIY-designed website, the USD 479 team has taken their refreshing facelift, accompanied by Foxbright's CMS features and attention to ADA compliance, and galloped with it. Since launch they've tailored the system to their personal needs, and to be honest, taught us a couple tricks along the way! The USD 479 project was a lesson in efficiency, merging many pages and consolidating resources to provide a streamlined experience for their students and community.
Project Highlights
- Utilization of Foxbright's Menus feature, which was enhanced during the project to meet USD 479's needs to customize text in the automated print view.
- The File Search feature has streamlined posting of various notices and Board Minutes to be as simple as uploading a document.
- Replaced their current mass notification tools with Foxbright's District App, uniquely integrated with their Facebook feed to pull posts through to the website and maintain styling with their website-based news feeds (and bypass the district social media filters for view-ability when on the district network!)
Old Mission Peninsula School, New Client - Oak
Located on the stunning Old Mission Peninsula in Traverse City, Old Mission Peninsula School (OMPS) took the jump into Foxbright's latest Oak design. As a PK-5 school, we were able to leverage Oak's design elements with splashes of lively color for a welcoming-yet-professional impression. Leaning into the scenic settings surrounding OMPS, their 'points of pride' section effectively promotes the school's adventurous spirit and identity. Full of color and student imagery, OMPS is a fun site to simply browse around for inspiration.
Project Highlights
- Appealing use of contrast between whites and district colors.
- Use of the logo shield shape across design elements for branding recognition.
- Visual Staff Cards to highlight and personalize their instructional 'crew.'
- Interactive spotlights and carousel galleries to highlight partners, programs, and student activities.
- Incorporation of Oak's tab layouts to consolidate information to boost navigability.
Lotus Design, The Other Kind
I've always been partial to the Lotus design (shoutout to other lovers of the 'tab') however, the element holding some partners from picking Lotus was the original main menu setup - a hamburger menu that mirrors a mobile menu regardless of device. Some appreciated the unifying experience for visitors of all devices, while others wished for a more traditional drop menu. As Foxbright tends to do, we heard the call of the skulk (TIL: skulk is the scientific term for a group of foxes, save that one for trivia night) and developed an alt-Lotus design to support traditional drop menus - same name, some differences, both options still available! Read on for the first two partners to implement the new look, my skulks.
Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah School District, New Client - Lotus
Also dubbed the 'Resorters,' Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah School District inspired the new variation of the Lotus design with goals to keep more information 'above the fold' and allow focus banner areas to maintain a more traditional aspect ratio without increasing the banner height. Pulling Lotus' traditional spotlights location to the side of the focus allowed for a unique look and expanded visual navigation area. The tab sections on Lotus' main landing pages allowed the resorters to maintain succinct and consistent district and building homepages.
Project Highlights
- Visual quicklink spotlights relieve reliance on drop menus and inherit to all pages so the most important resources are always a click away.
- Subsited building pages provide deep navigation options without relying on side menus.
- Foxbright assisted video mosaic, editing various events together to highlight district activities.
Big Jackson Public Schools, New Client - Lotus
Showing that the one-room schoolhouse has not gone out of style, Big Jackson Public Schools (BJPS) was ready to make a splash for the 2025-26 school year with a new website. After showing them highlights from the Resorters' website, BJPS was drawn to the new Lotus variation to maintain their previous navigation location while presenting existing page content in a more friendly manner. With only a handful of pages and consistent content layouts, there's no risk for a visitor to get lost in the weeds - not to mention within their tight-knit facility.
Project Highlights
- Limited site-map encouraged focusing on what content's there vs where content lives.
- Single information-rich pages, such as BJPS Board of Education, allows for an abundance of information to be presented without feeling overwhelming.
- Use of Foxbright's new Button Grid element allows for more stylized ad-hoc resource lists.
Return of the Kapok
Kapok maintains its record as being one of the most popular designs since development! Along the way, we've consistently found new creative ways to push the design into new territory - because the root of Foxbright's mission is creating unique custom designs for all clients, even when starting from one of our flexible design templates.
Eaton RESA, Redesign - Kapok
We've long partnered with Eaton RESA, along with other schools and organizations in the greater Tri-County Area. Their team is an excellent example of school-to-school collaboration, and it's been a pleasure for our team to cultivate these relationships over the years. We've been working through refreshes of websites in the area over the last couple years and Summer 2025 was Eaton RESA's time to shine. Drawn to Kapok for its modern horizontal layouts and interactive content delivery, we stuck to what's driven the design's popularity over the years while making visual adjustments to make the Eaton RESA website stand out.
Project Highlights
- Parallelogram shape applied to main navigation makes a first-of-its-kind experience, while providing a design element to carry through to other areas of the site.
- Massive site reorganization effort brought a site that has grown immensely over the years to be easy to navigate while providing a wealth of resources to the community.
- Robust high-level pages such as employment highlight the attention to detail from their content development team.
School District of Black Hawk, New Client - Kapok
Adding to Foxbright's growing presence across the pond in WI is the School District of Black Hawk, whose new site is one of the strongest in brand identity I've seen of late. The use of parallax-style background graphics, with a strong focus on district colors, offers a bold looks without feeling overwhelming. Shout out to their visual graphics teams for developing imagery that pairs well with Foxbright's interactive News and Spotlight features. While serving multiple communities, district pride spreads its wings across the entire Black Hawk region.
Project Highlights
- A twist on Kapok's standard below-banner navigation keeps the drop menus above the fold in the header across the site.
- Creative section divides allow a mix of the quintessential horizontal content Kapok is known for, while sprinkling in various column sections.
- Interactive Student / Staff / District recognition area aids in enforcing the Black Hawk mission.
Nuts and Bolts
Our Summer/Fall project roundup concludes with two of Foxbright's standby designs: Nutmeg and Magnolia. Fun fact: when a flower goes to seed it's called 'bolting'.
ba dum tss
Dutton Christian School, New Client - Magnolia
When the Magnolia design was developed, our goal was a clean, light and modern design befit for organizations with a focus on simplicity and style. While Dutton Christian maintains the original vision, I'm blown away by how the original design concept was pushed to the limits for this site and would be hard pressed to identify as anything other than fully custom. When Dutton Christian first set out, their goal was to re-create their existing site design but add the robust CMS tools Foxbright offers. As the design progressed, the skills of our design team elevated the site well beyond where they started. No complaints there!
Project Highlights
- Unique shading and application of focus banner overlay to highlight district strengths and mission.
- Interactive hover effects on spotlights to enforce mission on homepage and through the site.
- Modern slider effect to bring attention to buildings and programs.
- Stunning inside page focus banners and tactful use of spotlights throughout to provide interactivity.
Whitehall District Schools, Redesign - Nutmeg
Whitehall District Schools has partnered with Foxbright for a long time. As such, it has seen a variety of staff members responsible for the website over the years. Not unusual nor surprising that direction and tastes change over the span of years and you end up with a decades worth of information spread across many pages. When approaching the redesign, the site was nearly built from scratch - totally recreating the sitemap, archiving or removing ancient artifacts no longer relevant - and in many cases, existing in areas staff didn't even realize. At the core of the effort was bringing all the buildings back to consistency - eliminating vast, and sometimes redundant, sub-navigation and consolidating onto the main building homepages. Thanks to the Nutmeg design's plethora of content areas, much information was able to be organized into column tabs in addition to interactive spotlight quicklinks, news, and calendars allowing the district to maintain the core points of interest while building staff can focus on information specific to their students and families.
Project Highlights
- Drone footage of each facility adds movement for the district and building homepages.
- Strategic use of landing pages for a more styled resource delivery.
- Nutmeg design provided navigation access points without scrolling, while offering flexible layout structures for fully expanded pages.
What's Next?
Foxes don't hibernate, so as we approach the winter season Foxbright will continue down our roadmap of developing the most powerful CMS and Mobile App solutions the industry has to offer, while maintaining our focus of partnership, family, and personalized responsiveness. Summer 2025 saw a complete makeover of our Mobile App/Notifications tools to make communications between Staff/Students/Families more powerful than ever and both easy and fun - shout out to our district partners that provided vast end-user feedback and ideas as this effort was brought to fruition. We will continue to upgrade all of our partner apps and websites to the latest and greatest, while maintaining progress on development and enhancements.
Even since starting work on this post, we've launched new websites to highlight the next time you read here, a new website template and pubsite designs - interactive hall of fame anyone? Safely in our den for now, Foxbright might just have a major reveal of our own on the way... As always, thank you for your trust and partnership.
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