The websites of learning institutions typically give visitors the first impression of what they should expect. When a parent, guardian, or prospective students want to research an institution, they turn to the school website for information.
The school website reflects the values and principles of the school and its core ideologies while sharing all the best practices concisely and appealingly.
The following are checklists of the best practices for creating an efficient, effective and responsive school website.
When creating a school website, it is essential to use simple, straightforward, and easy to understand terms. It should not contain too many technical terms and jargon so that parents and students would find it easy to comprehend. The use of too many technical terms can make the website appear vague. Thus, the best way to communicate using a school website is to keep it straight and simple.
It is essential to write a school's website content through the lens of its audience, that is, ensuring that the messages are targeted to and appeal to students and parents. The rules and regulations of the school should be relevant to parents, and it should provide all essential details, including school hours, school bus facilities, late comings, attendance. The content of any school website must reflect the critical messages about the school's discipline while avoiding unnecessary regulations, which can later fit into the school calendar.
One perfect practice of building a school website is consistency in designs and messaging. When creating the content of a school website, ensure that the key messages and design elements are consistent across all the school's platforms. The designs and messages that should appear on the school's website should be the same or almost the same as what appears across its social media platforms. Consistency gives the website a professional feel and look. If the messages on a school website do not cohere with what is on its flyers and brochures, parents and students may get confused. Therefore, website designers must be familiar with the school's logo and other identification elements.
It is no new news that the world has greatly adopted social media as one of the ways of accessing information. Therefore, an important factor to consider while designing a school website is the integration of your functional social media channels into the website. Remember we stated above that your website should be simple and straight to the point. However, your audience does not have to be left out on all the juicy details that have happened or currently happening at the time. Integrating social media into your schools website makes it easy for your audience to access these details with just one click from your website to your social media page as it is not a problem at all to post all that you are willing to share about your school activities and programs on your social media channels.
Click to read more about Importance of social media in schools
It is an excellent practice that a school website captures the contact information of visitors either parents or students, when they visit for the first time. To get visitors' contact, you can impute an overlay form on the site. This way, it captures visitors' information, enabling the school to send personalized information to parents and students since they search for information to keep them interested. This engagement exercise aims to keep the school information fresh in the minds of parents and students, keeping them connected to the school.
A good school website practice entails designing a website that is easily accessible from anywhere and on any device—I.e a laptop, phone, tablet, i-pad etc. Due to the flexibility of mobile phones, you would be doing a lot of mishaps with a website that is not mobile-friendly, especially. Therefore, a school website must be mobile-friendly and responsive, making it easier for visitors ( parents and students) to access it from any device.
Furthermore, a school website is an insight into the plans and programs of the school. Therefore, adequate time and effort is required when building it. To attract the right audience and increase the success rate. In addition, organising web pages, navigation, and content in a simple but efficient way makes it a lot easier to provide an enjoyable user experience to everyone that visits the site. When this happens, there will be high conversion rates.
Which of these boxes would you be ticking when designing your school website? We would love to hear from you in the comment section.
After designing your school's website, the next step is to launch. Check out 8 things you should know before launching your school website.
