SCHOOL WEBSITE DESIGN
Any agency can hand a school a beautiful home page. The question is what it looks like in eighteen months, after four newsletters, a new principal and an enrolment campaign — and whether your office staff were able to do any of it themselves.
Design decisions get made in the abstract and then meet these four. It is worth knowing who they are before choosing a layout.
Is the bus running? Where do I send a note about an absence? They are not browsing — they want one fact and they want it before the bell.
They are comparing you with two others, on a phone, after the children are in bed. What they see in ninety seconds decides whether you get a tour booking.
Needs the term dates, the newsletter deadline and last year’s carnival photos, without emailing whoever built the site.
Has to be able to read the page, follow its structure and find the enrolment information. Everything above depends on this one working.
Most school websites are laid out like the school’s internal structure — a menu that mirrors the staff list. Parents do not think in departments. The pages that matter are the ones people arrive for, and those belong where a stranger would look first.
A theme is set to the school’s own palette and type, and pages are built from 216 elements rather than a handful of fixed slots. Two schools running the same theme do not look like each other, which is the usual giveaway of a templated site.
A design that only looks good on the designer’s laptop is not finished. Images are served at the size the device asked for, and the heavy parts of the editor never reach a visitor’s browser at all.
The best-designed school website goes stale in a term if every change is a support ticket. The point of the builder is that the person holding the information can publish it the same day.
Keyboard navigation, screen-reader labels and respect for reduced-motion preferences are properties of the building blocks, not an audit bolted on at the end. A school has a community it is obliged to serve, and part of it is not using a mouse.
A redesign that breaks every bookmarked and indexed URL costs a school its search traffic quietly, over about three months, with nothing in any log. Mapping the old addresses to the new ones is part of the build rather than an upsell.
We build the first version with you rather than handing over an empty site and a login. The order below is not a brochure — step one has to happen before the domain moves, or the record of your old pages is gone for good.
The current site, what people actually visit, and which pages carry the enrolment weight. This is also where the old URL list gets harvested, because once the new site is live the old one is gone.
Theme, palette, type and the home page, built with you rather than presented as a finished thing you approve or do not.
What is worth keeping comes across. What is three years out of date does not, and that conversation is usually the most useful part of the project.
Not a manual. The people who will publish sit down with the builder and publish something real.
Support, updates and improvements are part of the subscription. The difference is that a new page is yours to make rather than a job you raise and wait on.
Neither, quite. You get a theme set to your school’s colours, fonts and logo, and pages built from 216 elements rather than from fixed slots — so two schools on the same theme do not look like each other. We build the first version with you rather than handing over an empty site, and that covers the look, the way the site is put together, and moving across the content worth keeping.
Yes, and this is the part that usually decides it. A new landing page, a reworked newsletter, a banner for enrolment week — those are yours to make the moment you want them, instead of a job you raise with an agency and wait on. We still start every school ourselves, because a builder this flexible will happily let you make a site that drifts off-brand or behaves oddly on a phone. After that you have the run of it.
The content worth keeping comes across as part of the build. The part people forget is the links: a family with your enrolment page bookmarked, and the results already sitting in Google, both point at your old URLs. We map the old addresses to the new ones so those still land rather than hitting a dead end, which is the difference between a redesign and a redesign that quietly costs you your search traffic.
It has to — most parents reach a school website on a phone, usually in a hurry and often on a regional connection. Layouts are responsive by default and you can see each breakpoint while you edit rather than discovering a broken column after publishing.
The building blocks are built to be reachable by keyboard and screen reader, and reduced-motion preferences are respected. We will not tell you a website is permanently compliant, because accessibility is a property of the content a school publishes every week, not a box ticked once at launch — what we can do is make the defaults right and show your team what to watch for.
It is quoted per school, because a small primary and a multi-campus college are not the same job. The website and the everyday tools are the base; the larger modules — canteen ordering, event ticketing, enrolment — are charged only once your school switches them on. Pricing has the detail.
The most useful first conversation is about the website your school already has — what people use it for, what nobody can ever find, and which pages are quietly carrying your enrolments.
Start that conversation