Three things, all reported from the live mobile view.
WE ARE NOT AN OFFICIAL SERVICE
The value prop read "Official & trusted", whose grammatical subject is this
site — it reads as a claim that schoolcompare is an official service. It is
not; it is an independent site that republishes official figures. Now "Built
on official data", which describes the data instead.
Checked every other use of the word: all nine describe the data ("official DfE
figures", "the official figure isn't in") and are correct as they stand. That
one title was the only place the site described itself.
The footer now says it outright — "An independent site. Not affiliated with
the Department for Education or Ofsted." — so it appears on every page rather
than being left to inference. An e2e test asserts both halves: that the
statement is present, and that no text presents the site itself as official.
The disclaimer first measured 4.71:1 against a 4.5 floor. That is a fine
margin for decoration and the wrong one for a line whose job is to be legible
to someone checking whether this is a government site; it is now 5.59:1,
quieter than the copy around it by size rather than by contrast.
THE ARTWORK SAT UNDER THE SEARCH ON PHONES
The DOM keeps .heroContent first so the desktop overlay does not depend on
source order, which left the band stranded at the bottom of the panel, reading
as a strip stuck on the end rather than a hero image. `order` moves it above
the copy on phones; it is decorative and aria-hidden, so no reading order
changes. Measured on a 667px viewport — the shortest phone still in use — the
search button lands at 418px, comfortably inside the fold.
THE SEARCH INPUT WAS UNUSABLE ON PHONES
"Search schools" is a fixed 134px with white-space: nowrap, so it took 48% of
the row. Measured on staging:
390px input text space 102px placeholder needs 194px
360px 72px
320px 32px
At 320px you could not see what you were typing. The button now wraps to its
own full-width row below 480px, which fixes 360px and up — 390px goes from
102px to 226px of text space. The pill stays a single element, so it keeps its
border, shadow and :focus-within ring, and the button gains a full-width tap
target.
320px is still ~30px short. Closing it needs a shorter placeholder, which three
other tests match on by exact string; left alone deliberately rather than
churn them for a width that is effectively gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
