Doesn’t July seem like just five minutes ago? It won’t be long now before you’ll be welcoming children into your classroom for a brand new term, the sunny, laid-back days of August a distant memory.
If you’re responsible for updating the school website – or even if you’re yet to try using your website as an engagement tool – here are five things you might want to consider to prepare it for September.
Upload Information About Topics To Be Covered In September
This is a great way to get parents and pupils back into the mindset of learning. For those more proactive parents, it provides them with an opportunity to look at those topics at home with their children; for all parents, it will help them feel more engaged with your school.
This works even better if your school website has a smartphone app; uploading information to your news pages will be pulled through to the app on parents’ phones – meaning they’ll get a notification that there’s something for them to look at on your website! For more information about smartphone apps for school websites, just ask Webanywhere here.
Upload pictures Of Your Newly-Decorated Classroom
As the term progresses, you’ll be decorating the classroom with children’s work. For now, get some exciting photographs of what you have prepared in the classroom so far, giving children a taster for the fun they’ll soon be having in lessons! If your classroom is exciting enough, your children will be itching to get back to school!
Begin Tweeting
Social media is a vital tool for communicating with the world, and schools are using it more and more. If your school uses Twitter already, make sure you start ramping up the number of daily tweets as we approach the start of term, hinting at things to come. Make sure you direct to your school website; if your school website has a Twitter feed, even better.
Check Website Stats
Many school website systems will allow you to look at stats; you may also be able to do this through Google Analytics. If you have it, use this facility to look at the most popular areas of your school’s website – this will help you to determine which areas are most popular/useful for your website’s visitors, and it will also help you to prioritise which areas of the website to concentrate on most.
For example, many schools may find that their term dates is the most popular section of their website. Therefore they may decide to have all term dates uploaded before school starts, for those parents who may forget which day their child goes back!
Have A Spring (Well, Autumn) Clean
There’s nothing worse than visiting a website and seeing the same content that was on there six months ago. You should always ensure your school website is up to date with the latest news, pupil achievements and the like – but now is also a good time to have a scout through it and remove any content that is either no longer relevant, or is just taking up valuable space.
If possible, try to replace old content with new – but always make sure you have no content that’s going to undermine the website. Scrolling banners inviting people to the upcoming Sports Day – which was two months ago – are among the worst examples.
