If you’re a school, your website is probably one of the most important tools in your marketing arsenal. It’s also one of the easiest ways to get a big boost in traffic and generate more recognition from potential students. If you want to see positive results from your website, it needs to be designed well and have the right information on it. So what should every school website contain? Here are four things we believe every school website needs.
About Page
Your school’s website should be a welcoming place for current and prospective families. It should be a central place for your community to find information about your school and the values you represent.
This is why we always recommend creating an About page on your site, where you can tell the story of how you came together as educators, what makes your school unique, who’s involved in running it, and any other important details that help people get to know the school and its people.
School News
News is essential to keeping parents and students engaged with the school. It also gives you the opportunity to showcase what your school has to offer including what events are coming up and what awards have been won recently.
Here are some tips for making sure your news section is fresh, relevant, and engaging:
- Keep it fresh. News should be updated regularly. If you only post once per month, you’ll end up having old information on an otherwise up-to-date website. Get in the habit of updating your news section at least once every few days to keep things fresh; this will also help keep your social media feeds moving along nicely (if you have them)!
- Use a Content Management System (CMS). The CMS will make it easy for you to add new items without losing everything else that’s been posted previously—and if someone needs to update something quickly because they forgot something important, they can do so without worrying about saving their changes first before publishing them live online.
Contact Forms
Contact forms are an important part of your website. They can be used to drive traffic, gather leads, and build relationships with students and parents.
- Use a mix of email addresses and phone numbers. You want to make it easy for people to reach you no matter where they’re at, and the best way to do this is by making sure your contact form allows both types of communication.
- Keep it short and simple. It’s tempting to fill out all of the fields that appear on a contact form so you can collect as much information as possible about visitors who use it. However, this may not be necessary or even helpful in some cases. By keeping things simple, you’ll give visitors more confidence in submitting their information while also saving time on your end processing requests from people who aren’t serious prospects anyway.
School Calendar
One of the first things you do when you start working on your website is add your academic calendar, right? You may even have created teacher calendars, student calendars and now even parent calendars so that families can see what’s going on in each classroom. It is important to make sure that all those calendars are easy to find at any time. By placing them high up on your homepage, or by adding links to them from other key pages like staff pages and student schedules, visitors can find information quickly and easily.
Conclusion
Creating a strong and memorable school website is one of the best ways to highlight your school as an institution. It’s something every school should strive to do. A memorable website is more likely to generate interest and encourage people to keep coming back.
