Ten Features of a Great School Web Design

1. Does the Website Design suit your school community?

Is your school community highly diverse and multicultural? Are your students travelling long distances to attend? Does your educational philosophy have an underpinning in arts and creativity? Are you in a small rural town or an inner suburb of a major city?

This unique-to-your-school information all informs your website design. A generic website template won’t cut it. Your school’s online presence must reflect your community’s particular values, interests, aesthetics – and the site design or ‘look’ needs to grab new or returning site visitors.

The colours, content, language, images/icons and structure of your site have to make sense to your viewers, old and new, while turning visitors’ heads your way by presenting information in a striking yet user-friendly style.

2. Ensure your digital presence is as active as your school communities

What do your school stakeholders want to read and access on your website? Do they need details of up-and-coming events, links to newsletters, access to students’ assessments and grades?

That’s where engaging content plus website features such as an interactive events calendar, student/staff portals, school management software, virtual school tours, social media sharing, online resources and more come in.

3. Ease of use & simple navigation is imperative

The structure of your school website’s pages, navigation menus and content can keep viewers eyes on your site and have them eager to find out more – or bounce them away in annoyance and confusion. Your site must be easy and enjoyable to use – with no frustrating arrow-back dead-ends.

Some general rules for simplifying navigation:

• All key content should be located within 1-2 clicks. Don’t bury content your website visitors need to find behind a labyrinth of lead-in pages.
• Keep your main navigation menu to less than 10 tabs. Too many items can confuse viewers.
• Use plain language. Jargon might sound hip, but it doesn’t help comprehension for those not in the know, so avoid using specialised terms or phrases.
• Feature a site-search facility. And let your website visitors access all of your site’s information in one.

4. Mobile-First design

Most websites receive more than half of their total traffic via searches on smart phones, so your school website must look great and function well across numerous different screen sizes and orientations.

Is there a difference between a responsive site versus one designed specifically with mobile viewing in mind? Absolutely. A responsive website design will re-orient itself to fit across several devices. A mobile-first website incorporates changes to the site design to make the smart phone viewing experience equally as pleasing as when viewing it on a desktop.

5. Quality photography/videography

School facilities have a big say on future enrolments and on current student/parent wellbeing and the learning environment; so showcase your classrooms, play areas, music faculty, sports halls, cafeteria and more on your website with high quality images and videos.

Well-lit, expertly framed imagery (including aerial drone footage) is a superb way of catching new student eyes while instilling pride in your present school community.

In addition to your school’s physical features, you can also highlight events, clubs and other extracurricular activities on offer. Displaying these attractively on your website will help you engage with a bigger student audience.

6. Accessibility and language options

Make your website easy to use for people of all abilities, by making it WCAG (Web Content Accesibility Guidelines) compliant.

An accessible school website design will immediately communicate an inclusive approach and values, gain you trust and respect from prospective students and families with differing needs.

Accessibility Options

• Ensure your copy is written with scalability and contrast in mind so it will adapt well to screen-magnifiers.
• Enable the keyboard navigation option, making your website easy to use with assistive technologies and without needing a mouse.
• Minimise moving content, as some people have difficulty tracking moving objects.
• Supply transcripts with any audio or video files for the hearing impaired and consider using Auslan or an appropriate language.
• Make sure colour and contrast throughout your site adhere to accessibility guidelines.
• Include text alternatives (‘alt text’) for any images or illustrations.
• Use text-to-speech software to highlight text on screen as it reads it aloud.

Offering multiple languages for visitors to your site helps students and families feel welcome whatever their culture or ethnicity, to your community. Add a drop-down menu listing all the languages you have available and make your translations are accurate and up-to-date. Read more here about making your website accessible.

7. Up-to-date online learning systems and school management software

One effect of the pandemic has been to boost the importance of an online presence for schools. Many classes, exams, reports, trackers of student progress have moved online, meaning it’s imperative to include a section on your school website detailing how you are adapting in these areas and a sophisticated functional online learning portal which integrates seamlessly onto your website. Online learning is here to stay – and your site has to keep up with trends and technological changes and ever-increasing standards of virtual learning excellence.

There are numerous excellent school management software systems available to help with timetabling, assist parents to keep track of student progress, construct student profiles, aid community engagement and everything your school needs to keep pace in today’s increasingly online world. Your school (and website) can’t afford not to include this most critical of digital tools.

8. Well written, cohesive content

Content writing is the e-window into your school – what it does, what it stands for and what you offer that other schools don’t.

Container-loads of new content are uploaded onto the Internet every day. But how do you to stand out from the mountains of formulaic info? With text and images to stimulate and which make sense to your potential students and their families.

Like it or not, the web is uncompromising, viewers are selective, online attention spans are short, and competition is fierce. Don’t make visitors to your school site sift through oceans of bland, repetitive text. Effective content writing offers readers a lifeline of focused, fresh copy they can really hear and identify with.

9. Safe and secure website hosting

In today’s heavily populated online world, the number of cyber attacks on school websites is on the rise. Everyone accessing your school’s website has to feel confident that their private information is safe — so ensuring that your school’s website has the latest security, firewalls, quality web hosting to safeguard your privacy and data is essential.

All school websites need to have automated, regularly scans for malware, spam & viruses every 24 hours as well as ensuring the IT team at the school have in place the necessary, adaptable digital barriers to fight off ever-increasing volumes of scammers and viruses.

10. Fast loading/Easy to use CMS

Site loading speed has a big influence on whether current or prospective family members will even bother visiting your website. A significant percentage of website visitors will immediately look elsewhere if your site takes more than a few seconds to load.

There’s no point having an eye-catching and beautifully functional website if no one can find you online. A top search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy drives traffic to your site via appropriate key words and search terms positioned within your content. Sharp, energised blog posts combined with intelligent link building are also key.

The aim of the SEO game is to expand your online visibility so search engines such as Google will index your site at a higher rate, putting you nearer the top of search engine pages.

If you want a website that works and looks great, you’ll also need a Content Management System (CMS) that is easy and logical for your staff to use (and doesn’t need driving by a coding expert), thereby simplifying the maintenance and updating of your website. Read more about Content Management Systems here.

Be inspired with some of our School Website Designs here.