Whether your school already has a website, you’re about to get one, or you’re thinking of changing your school website, one thing should always be a priority for you: Keeping it up to date.
This may seem like an obvious statement. But bearing in mind that a regularly updated website can vastly improve your Google rankings, and that many people will keep on coming back if they see new content each time they visit, it’s vital to make your online presence a priority. Keeping your content fresh is vital for attracting prospective parents to your school website.
So, in order for you to keep your school website up to date without having to devote a significant amount of your time to it, we have five ideas for you.
Choose A System That’s Easy To Use
The easier your website system is to update and manage, the quicker you can update it. No one likes using a system that’s laborious and complicated; least of all busy teachers. When choosing a school website, or moving to a new one, always consider how much of your time it’s going to take up with creating new pages, adding text and uploading photographs. Of course, School Jotter is designed to be as simple as possible – because we believe that if a website system requires weeks of training before you can even get started, it’s not worth bothering with.
Assign Responsibilities
Many schools will assign one person to keep the website updated. However, if you have luxury of a few members of staff contributing, assign different people to different areas of the website. For example, your secretary could keep your events pages up to date with the latest open evenings, sports days and school parties, or your children could write blog posts for their teacher to upload. If each area of piece of content is assigned to a specific member of staff, it’ll be easier to keep all areas of your website up to date.
Also, giving deadlines for when certain content needs to be added – for example, updating of classwork pages every Friday by 3pm – may also help with ensuring content is regularly added.
Try Different Things
You don’t want maintaining your website, or creating content for it, to become boring for you and your staff. If you lose interest, so will your website’s visitors. So, try new ways of adding content every now and then, and keep your website fresh. Getting the children involved with the school website is a great way to improve their ICT skills – and they’ll feel a real part of the school too, both online and offline.
One example of trying something different could be creating a video of the children’s classwork, narrated by the children, rather than uploading the work itself.
Have Website Meetings
Keep the website front-of-mind for all concerned with regular website meetings – or, have the website as part of the agenda for your other regular meetings. This is also a great way to generate new ideas for content – and you can check on progress of updates and changes to the website.
Encourage Feedback
There’s no better way to find out if your school website is doing the trick than to ask visitors what they think of it. You could set up a form on your website for feedback – even ask specific questions about the website – and then make any changes according to the information you get back.
You could also widen the net and ask the children themselves what they think to it – or send out a short survey to parents. This way, you can get vital information about things like how regularly the News section should be updated – or whether the website design is appealing enough. Respond to the feedback with what people want – and you’ll have visitors coming back to your school’s website again and again.
