School Jotter is the UK’s most popular school website system. Over the years, we’ve watched as more and more schools adopt our system and use it to improve parental engagement, bring a school closer to its community and create a focus point for pupils and teachers.
But despite being an easy-to-use website system with intuitive design, there are always going to be features that a school is either going to overlook or consider to be of less importance.
So – we’ve listed three tricks to help schools get more out of their school websites, in ways they may never have considered before.
Allow Parents To Pay For School Dinners Or Trips
There are many products out there on the market for schools, that allow parents to securely pay for anything from school dinners to trips, using an online service. But why go to all that effort? You can simply add a Paypal button to any page of your School Jotter website!
It means you can create a page about, say, a charity day that the school is getting involved with, or maybe a trip to France you’re planning for Class 5. Then, at the bottom, add the Paypal button – and parents can pay straight to your school’s Paypal account instantly!
To add a Paypal button to any page of your website, follow the instructions on our help sheet at www.jottercommunity.com, which you can find here.
Integrate Twitter With Your School Website
This is a great feature of School Jotter if your school has a Twitter account. If it doesn’t, we highly recommend it – it’s another way of improving home/school links and keeping parents informed.
Adding a Twitter feed to your school website is quick, easy and ultimately saves you a lot of time in the future. Why? Because by adding a Twitter feed, your website will stay up to date as long as you regularly use your Twitter account, without having to constantly add content or change your school website design.
In other words, each Tweet you publish will appear on your school website. Meaning you can cut down time in updating both your social media outlets and your school’s news section.
You can either add the Twitter feed to your school website’s homepage, or to a dedicated News section. We recommend the former.
To add a Twitter feed to your school website, follow the instructions here.
Get Feedback On Your Website From Visitors
Webanywhere has just launched a brand new app, Surveys, which allows you to create online questionnaires for anyone to complete. One feature of these is the ability to embed them onto school websites.
Surveys is now available to purchase (you can enquire or get a demo here) but for now, if you like the idea of getting feedback from site visitors, here’s a stop-gap: the guestbook/commenting feature.
Obviously parents can give their opinions on your school via ParentView, but if you want more direct responses on either your school or its website, find out how easy it is to add the guestbook feature here.
The great thing is, comments can appear on your website – but you can moderate them first! Meaning you can get feedback from parents – and the cream of the crop will help sell your website to prospective parents!
If you’re a School Jotter customer and need help or advice with using and updating your website system, you can find out help sheets and videos at www.jottercommunity.com. If you’re not a School Jotter customer but would like to see it for yourself, you can set up a free trial here.
We’re also currently running a special offer for school web design – with discounts for redesigns of school websites. Get in touch to find out more here.
