What makes a good school website? Lessons from practice
A school website serves at least three audiences simultaneously: students, parents and staff. That makes it challenging. Everyone is looking for something different and nobody has patience to search for long. A good school website is therefore not a brochure, but a workspace.
We've built and delivered multiple school websites. These are the lessons that keep coming back.
Parents want answers, not stories
Most visitors to a school website are parents. They're looking for practical information: timetables, holidays, contact details, absence reporting, enrolment procedures. That information needs to be findable within two clicks. Not hidden under a submenu, not wrapped in a news post from three months ago.
A common mistake is filling the homepage with atmospheric images and mission statements. That looks nice, but a parent searching for the administration's phone number is gone within ten seconds.
Students only use their phone
Any school website that doesn't work perfectly on mobile, doesn't work. Students open the site on their phone, scroll quickly and expect everything to load immediately. That means: large buttons, short text, fast load times and no popups blocking the screen.
This sounds obvious, but many school websites are designed and approved on a desktop screen in a meeting room. Always test on mobile first.
Staff need to manage content themselves
A school website is only useful if the school can maintain it. News items, calendar events, team changes, documents. If every update has to go through an external agency, it either doesn't happen or happens too late.
This requires a CMS that matches the digital skills of the team. Not a system with twenty toolbars and endless options. A clear admin panel with straightforward fields: title, text, image, publication date. That's usually all you need.
Structure matters more than design
The most beautiful design is useless if the information architecture is wrong. Before thinking about colours and typefaces, the structure needs to be right. Which pages do you need? How are they grouped? Where does the navigation lead? What belongs on the homepage and what doesn't?
Good structure answers one question for every visitor within five seconds: am I in the right place?
Accessibility is not an extra
School websites must be accessible. Not as a bonus, but as a baseline requirement. Good contrast ratios, readable font sizes, alt text on images, a logical heading structure and keyboard navigation. This isn't only for visitors with disabilities. It makes the site better for everyone.
Since the European Accessibility Act, this is no longer a voluntary ambition but a legal obligation.
The one thing every school forgets
Search. Parents search by keyword. "School trip", "report card", "flu protocol". If your site doesn't have a working search function, you're forcing visitors to click through menus for information you've already published. A good search function is the simplest way to make your site immediately more usable.
Layer by layer, just like our websites.