What makes a great school website?

By | May 16, 2022
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What makes a great School Website?

At times, the school management teams are looking for insights on what makes a great school website and they need to understand the importance of having a useful website for their school. This blog is to help them get clarity on the subject.

Since the increased rate of Internet penetration, more and more individuals and organisations have realised the importance of being available on the web. While a lot of individuals use websites as a means of personal branding and portfolio, for other organisations, especially those with a strong Brick and Mortar (offline) presence, it serves a great deal to establish their brand image on the Internet and make the most of the opportunities available here. The importance of having a great website for a school can’t be realized any better than these COVID-19 or the global lockdown in the year 2020.

Educational institutions, especially the schools, require a website that is not flashy, but instead, is minimalistic and lays emphasis on what’s the most important information they must convey. A good school website should provide value to all the stakeholders of the educational institution, be it the parents, students, and teachers. A few important questions one must ask before getting a school website ready, are as below:

  1. Does the website enable visitors to quickly and easily find what they are looking for?
  2. Does the website help in creating an engagement between the institution and the users i.e. students and parents?
  3. Is the website easy-to-manage for the staff members?
To get some useful tips and best practices to create a great school website, read on:

  • Define the purpose of website

A good school website is useful for its target audience. What it implies is that the website content must always stay in sync with the brand of the school or college. Rather than replication of a competitor’s website or creating a website which is better than your competitor, ask yourself what makes your brand unique and if it helps you achieve your end goals and objectives.

  • Should have one target audience in mind

The greatest attribute of a school website is its focus on the audience it wants to target. While businesses can have multiple audiences, a school website should serve the needs of its audience, which includes parents of prospective students, current students and their parents, the government regulatory authorities, and the school staff.

A school’s website should engage the student and parents at each level of the website’s flow.  It should provide necessary information and be easy to understand for a parent or potential student. The workflow and navigation should follow an intuitive design to make it easy-to-use for those who may not be well versed with technology.

  • It should be responsive

In today’s time, accessing web pages on mobile has become a norm. People are no longer required to carry laptops or PCs to access a website. It is due to this surge in the number of mobile users, that responsive and mobile-friendly design has become a necessity.

A responsive website can be shared through different social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and so on, while also being able to resize itself and adjust the content as per the device it is accessed on.

  • Embrace minimalism

Most of the time, school websites are guilty of publishing too much information with little attention to layout, displaying pages that are cluttered with heavy text or multimedia content. This is where minimalism can be your best bet. Use minimalistic design elements and try to convey your ideas and information in a lesser number of words.

Minimalism provides for a soothing user experience and ensures that the entire information is evenly distributed across the web page.

  • What is important is easy to find

A good school website should allow users to easily locate the information they are looking for, without having to confuse them. It should enable easy navigation and finding relevant and most important question be it admission process or fee structure.

  • It should have a strong call-to-action

The web pages of a school website should not have a dead-end. Each page should have a carefully planned navigation leading to the next logical step without consuming much time and effort of the user accessing the website.

A good school website is one that has logical call-to-action buttons and helps users explore what is inside the website and help them find answers quickly to the commonly asked questions.

  • It should be regularly updated

A good school website is most often, more frequently updated when compared to other websites. With regular and timely updates about the events at the school, it should be promptly updated to keep pace with the audience visiting to check updates.

  • It is optimized for search

Your school website should be optimized for greater visibility in search results. For a school to be discovered by the maximum number of its target audience, it should be good enough to rank first when a user searches for them online.

We, at Ascezen Consulting, have extensive experience in creating useful, aesthetically appealing, and easy to access and manage websites for schools or educational institutions. We can help you create an information-rich and attractive school website. Get in touch with us to know more about our web development expertise, look at our past work, and/ or get a quote.