A website with great visuals and rich content can give you an edge over other schools. A website will allow you to offer more information than the school’s main page. However, the website must be attractive enough to parents that they will consider bringing their children to your school. Tech Client can help you build a fantastic school website. Below are some tips to help you design a school website.
We all know the signs of bad design. After all, we have all been on bad school websites. But not for very long and we don’t return. This article is about that. It’s easy for people to point out the bad things, but how do they create great websites for schools?
Start with a school website planning checklist. This checklist can be found here. How does that translate into practical terms?
Education website design is crucial
A school website design should be well thought out. Good images are half the work. Designing a school website isn’t just about how it looks, but also about the experience and feeling of the users.
There are many types of people who use educational websites. These include parents, future students, parents, teachers, students, professors, and job seekers. Although it’s difficult to identify the target audience in this instance, it’s possible to narrow it down. It’s a challenging task to design a website for a school.
Home page ‘Useful
When we say useful, we mean that visitors can quickly navigate to the next click without much scrolling or maneuvering. While a great homepage should look good and be attractive, there are great templates in many CMS packages. However, if your visitors are spending too much time on your homepage, it’s likely they are confused. A useful school homepage will ensure that website visitors start off on a positive note.
Download our free School Website Planning Guide
What does this translate to, for instance, a parent who is trying to find contact information on your site in a hurry but cannot and then leaves frustrated? Or how about the parent who looks at your website from her smartphone and spends more time resizing it by dragging and zooming rather than doing homework with her child.
Responsive design
Responsive design, also known as mobile-friendly design, is an essential element in modern school website design. Your website will be accessible on a wide range of mobile devices. Responsive design makes sure that every web page is easily readable on any device: a mobile phone, a tablet, a computer with a touchscreen, a laptop or a tablet. Your pages are automatically resized and formatted to remove any annoying and tedious dragging or zooming that could be distracting the viewer.
Create information hierarchies
This tip naturally follows the one before it. This tip is a natural extension of the previous one. With such a large amount of data, it’s important to organize it better than any other place. A well-structured university website design is what makes it the best. The best university website design will be the one that can be used for the entire educational process.
It is important that all sections of the homepage are accessible. While it might seem simple, organizing information at a university or college is no easy task. The designer should not be the only one involved. It’s important to have someone who can understand how all information should be placed and grouped within the website structure. While it is important not to overwhelm, you must also make sure that your potential customers have all they need.
Consider your options and choose a design.
The design of your website will show parents how passionate you are about their school and the dedication you have to students. Great website designers will find the best things about you, and then they can help you focus on design. Showcase the accomplishments of your students over the past years if you want more students. Although it’s fashionable to be different from the norm, it doesn’t make the site stand out. Also, consider mobile responsiveness. The site should be simple to navigate for normal users. You should hire a professional website designer who can make a website that works best for you school.
Respect accessibility requirements for websites
There are many factors that go into making a website accessible to people with disabilities. I will only be focusing on the essential structure. You can find more resources at the School Website Accessibility & ADA Education Center.
Your website will have to comply with the WCAG2.0 AA standard. Please see “WCAG2.0 and what it means ADA compliance for school websites” for more information. Some of these items will only be necessary to publish a webpage. Others may require technical assistance to alter the website template. Nicole Bremer Nash has additional resources and information. You can also visit “Creating an ADA-compliant Website” to get Section 508 Accessibility checklists.
Use videos that contain actual information
Many people prefer visual material to traditional text. You don’t have to eliminate all text content from your website. However, videos can convey some information. Instead of a series of pages, you can make one video and ensure that everyone understands what they are seeing. It is important to remember that not everyone will love it, so give the option to download the brochure.
You can save as much time possible.
The ideal website will help you save time and money. This is where the hardest part of building documents is. You must be specific about how you want your website to function and where you want it to appear before users. The better your website will look, the more information you can provide to your web development company.
A well-organized navigation
Well-designed navigation is intuitive, well-organized navigation. It is crucial to the usability of a school’s website. In website organization, it is recommended to use the 7 Link rule. Create navigation and sub-navigation using seven links. Studies show that people are more likely make a decision when there are seven or fewer links available. It can become overwhelming to have too many links.
Keep it agile
Events and programs that are in high demand change very quickly, so your website should be updated accordingly. It is important to present top learning stories in different ways so that it doesn’t become boring. This means that there will be a lot of optimization and testing required to find the best information layout. You might also consider displaying materials on pages created specifically for such materials.
Even if the website is not for a college or university, the concepts will still be applicable. The trends can change rapidly, but the audience needs to remain engaged. People don’t get bored by the way other websites approach things. You should always be available to change the information in your design frame.
Always do your best to make your school better
The best tip is to do better. This is something you should always remember. You can make your website more attractive by doing better. This will help you grow your school faster and increase your reach to the public.
Make it available to everyone
Many educational institutions today accept students from all over the globe. People from all cultures and backgrounds visit these websites in order to find the right information. Universities and colleges must be able to convince potential customers that they are offering a service. The cost of education is very high so credibility is essential.
Design means that you must take into consideration many factors. It is important that a website has both an English version and one in the local language. You might also have the option to provide information in two different formats – one for local students, and one for internationals. It could be a competitive advantage for a website in an international arena.
Popular pages simplified
You should also pay attention to popular pages on your website, along with the always-popular school calendar. These can be identified easily by performing a Google analytics analytics review. These are generally the top pages of any school website.
Final Thoughts
You are still trying to figure out how to design an educational website. You don’t have to be intimidated by the complexity of certain designs. Every college and university that you find online can overcome these problems. We hope this article has given you some useful ideas for designing school websites. Fireart.Studio can help you get more ideas or create a custom design. We’re happy to help!
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