When your pupils’ parents visit your school website this month, it won’t just be to see their children in the Nativity play. It won’t just be to find out when the last day of term is.
There’s a whole host of ways your school website can attract more visitors, and stay engaged with parents this winter. It’ll make using your website a more enjoyable experience.
Snow Days
There was a time when parents and children alike would have an ear glued to the radio whenever it snowed, just in case their school announced it’d be closed for the day. Still, you’d always find there were the odd few parents who didn’t get the message – making a wasted journey through the snow and ice to drop off their children.

These days, parents can stay informed of snow days by merely visiting your website, when you can keep them updated not just on whether you’re closing or not, but whether you think you may be closed for longer. School Jotter 2 allows you to update your school website wherever you are, even if you only have a tablet to hand – with easy editing capabilities. School Jotter 2 also offers an update app option, which allows parents to stay informed via a free app they can download. It’ll update them instantly as soon as you add news content to your website.
Non-Uniform Days
Christmas time could be a perfect excuse for a non-uniform day. Charging pupils, say, 50p to come to school in non-uniform is an opportunity to raise money for the school, and it helps them relax a little in the run-up to Christmas. You can inform parents of the special day via the website – and keep them up to date with how much you’ve raised. Building excitement around the day and your aim to collect enough money to, say, buy a tablet for the school may even inspire some parents to give more than just 50p!
End Of Term Awards
It’s the end of the year and the end of term – a great opportunity to award pupils for the hard work they’ve put in since September. Announce the awards via the website and every parent will be proud of their child – meaning greater engagement between parent, pupil and school, and a greater incentive to hit the ground running in 2013.
Pictures of the awards being handed out, with smiling pupils and the work they’ve been awarded for, would make great website content and plenty of festive ‘feelgood factor.’
Christmas Messages
Your website is the perfect tool for sending out a Christmas message to parents – both from the school and from the children. If your pupils are making and sending Christmas cards to each other this month, the school website is where you can showcase them. If you have a learning platform and a student e-portfolio system, encouraging children to send each other e-cards via the messaging system will improve student interaction and build relationships between them.
International Christmas Celebrations
Your website is great for showing the work done within school. So a task for pupils like demonstrating how different countries around the world celebrate Christmas – and pictures of their work posted on your website – shows the world how forward-thinking and all-encompassing your school is. It makes great content away from the typical Christmas activities – and may introduce your school to a much wider audience!
And Not Forgetting…
Decorations! Your school website is your shop window to the world – to parents and potential new pupils alike. So decorate especially for the season – with fun, colourful images, some season’s greetings – maybe even a colour scheme change for the month!

Your school website is the perfect tool for communicating with parents – and a great opportunity for them to engage with your school. It means that, instead of having to pop into the school, or find the phone number, they can discover what their child has been up to, read about forthcoming events and even meet the staff, from the comfort of their armchair.
But what exactly do parents want from a school website? A recent discussion on Mumsnet threw up some interesting comments and suggestions for what would make a good school website for parents – and it also highlighted that, in some cases, parents maybe aren’t getting the information they need from their child’s school website.

The most popular requirements for a good school website were probably the most obvious: many mums expressed a need for a list of upcoming events, online versions of school newsletters and a term diary to all be included.

But other popular suggestions were for content that would help parents engage with the school more – things that don’t always seem a priority when a school website is put together. School club details, school uniform list and that week’s homework were all mentioned, with Mumsnet user meredeux suggesting a “List of holiday activities to replace all those leaflets that keep coming home in the bookbags.”

User piprabbit added: “It needs to build its links to social media especially as there are very active FB groups relating to the school.”
Ofsted reports, school rules and copies of letters home were also listed, so that parents could more actively help their children in the evenings, as was a contacts page – maybe even a teacher ‘about’ section. Which suggests that parents are much more keen to be engaged with their child’s school, on all levels, than you might expect.
Some of the users on Mumsnet even provided details of their favourite sites – with user veritythebrave saying they liked the curriculum and classes part on Shipley C of E Primary School’s School Jotter site. Their website is a content-full, extensive one, and they’ve included most of the popular features mumsnet users mentioned.
The comments in the Mumsnet discussion could provide a useful basis from which to plan your school’s website. Obviously, the more appropriate the content and the easier your website is to navigate around, the more useful it’ll be for the parents to use, and the more they’ll use it. But remember that, as well as being a news portal to get messages to parents, and a great advertising tool for attracting new pupils, your school website is also the perfect opportunity to allow parents to get more involved with the school and its activities, and provide more input into what you do.
Your school website is a vital tool for communication in today’s digital world: make sure you make the most of it!

The release of School Jotter 2 saw the UK’s most popular school website management system get even better – find out what’s new.
But we haven’t stopped there; School Jotter is under continual development, as we use customer feedback to develop new features and functionality, and strive to improve the speed and performance of School Jotter websites.

Recent new additions include an HTML editor, for the more technically minded member of staff looking to change website code themselves (the Webanywhere support team are always on hand to make the changes if you prefer), and wide ranging enhancements of features such as slideshows, forms and calendars.

We have also added more application servers to improve load balancing and also improved server specifications – put simply we have invested in improving the performance and speed of School Jotter websites!
Continual product innovation and investment ensures that when you become a School Jotter customer, you will have all the latest tools at your disposal, and your school website will be outstanding.