Website Design For Schools In The UK
This is a tricky issue for non-experienced website designers. While wanting to save on costs by doing their school web design themselves, schools should make sure they meet the Ofsted requirements when it comes to website content and structure.
One of the problems many school website designers encounter is that they use too many colors making their content very difficult to read. What follows are some tips to help create a beautiful website design for schools in the UK.
Defining Your School’s Brand and Content Strategy
Knowing your school’s brand and what you stand for will help you write the content for your school’s website. You need to understand the school’s core values as well as what your school stands for.
Then you need to understand what your school does well and what problems it can solve for its students. There are other key questions you can ask yourself before you start creating a content strategy.
That strategy will revolve around the answers to all of those key questions. Plus, understanding the purpose of your school will help you create a unique website look that stands out from the crowd.
What also is involved in defining your school’s brand will be the following elements:
- Develop your school’s promise to potential parents and students
- Add a tagline that reflects the purpose of the school
- Create your school’s identity- this includes creating a logo, finding your voice, the imagery you want to use, and the colours you want to use.
Defining your school’s brand is a wide range of elements that help potential and current students know who you are. That makes your website more attractive than using a number of bright or other colours.
Building A Solid User-Friendly Experience On The School Website
In the world of web design, there are a lot of options you can use to build complexity to your school’s website design. However, the old sayings ‘keep it simple’ and ‘less is more’ are key guides you should use when creating a primary school website design.
Yes, having fun things like pop-ups, interactive polls, and lots of videos can help but often those elements and other ones turn the user experience into something far more time-consuming than parents want to go through.
The key to building a good user experience on your school’s website is to follow these key tips:
1. Keep The Website Focused On Current School Parents
Make sure the relevant information is easy to access and find. Those important issues of tuition costs, teacher contact opportunities, and school events all should be very easy for the current school parent to find.
2. Focus On Enrollment
Make your enrollment process a priority. Part of the school’s website design is to attract new students to your school. This can partly be achieved through your About Us web page.
3. Help Busy Parents
This is done by having a clear school calendar on your website. Then make it easy to access for those busy parents who do not have the time to waste doing complicated searches or bypassing pop-ups, etc.
4. Miscellaneous Pages
These include contact information, a news and media web page, and more. You want to keep your school web design interesting without making it hard for parents to navigate through all the pages to get the information they want.
Add Interactive Features and Compelling Content for engaging the audience
Once you have understood your school’s identity and purpose, and then fleshed out a content strategy, now is the time to add some more interesting elements to your school website design.
Look for key features that can incorporate interactive activities. These will help engage both parents and students. Then make sure to have someone write excellent content that will be of interest to those school parents.
Content is still king and will help boost your school’s website in the search engine rankings. Bad content is one way to drive prospective students and parents away from your school.
Some Additional Words
Since 2003, School Jotter has been working with thousands of schools across the UK and worldwide to develop the best school website and e-learning software. We always make sure our school web design reflects the ethos of each school.
Contact us today to see how we can help make your school website design more attractive and user-friendly. Our experts will be glad to spend time working with you to enhance your public face.
