Having outlined who your website is for, creating a website for a school can be a complicated process. However, once you have planned the content you will have saved a lot of time in the long run.
Start With Statutory Requirements
Start with the Statutory Requirements that must be published online by maintained schools in England. This includes admissions, curriculum, and financial information, for example. Check out what other information must be published by other schools and incorporate this into your planned content to ensure that all necessary information is included.
Organise Around Your Audiences
In terms of the audiences listed above, current parents, prospective families and staff / governors of schools are the three main groups of people that visit a school’s website. They need different things from the website, and these need to be made available to them as quickly as possible. Organising your website’s content in this way will ensure that your website is user-friendly.
Write for Parents, Not Staff
If you want Websites for schools, https://www.fsedesign.co.uk/websites-for-schools/ is a good place to start.
School websites are so often written by those within a school in such a way that they are not accessible to others including, crucially, new parents of current students. Avoid using acronyms, ‘jargon’ (terms that are only used within specific situations or by specific groups of people) and references to school’s ‘committees’ and instead use short sentences within clear, simple headings.
Build in a Content Review Routine
Before content is published, there should be adequate planning of updates to the website to ensure the content is up to date. This should be assigned to a member of staff on a term by term basis and a review date set for updates to the section of the website they are responsible for.
Get the Right Support
Good content planning saves a great deal of fixing later.