Seems like award season is never ending – Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, et al. But what about award-winning school website design? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or can we all agree what is a well-designed school website?
We all know what makes for bad design, for we've all been on bad school websites – but not for long, and we don’t come back. That’s the point of this article. It’s easy to spot the bad stuff, but how do you go about creating a great school website?
Great website design starts with good planning. You have to first plan to achieve the results you want from your school website. According to the National School Public Relations Association and their NSPRA annual award program, “Content clarity, appropriateness and freshness, graphic design, usability, functionality and overall depth of information.” What does that mean in practical terms?
What does that mean, for example, to the parent who needs to find contact information on your website in a hurry, but can’t, and leaves frustrated? Or what about the parent who is viewing your website on her phone and is spending more time re-sizing your page by dragging and zooming than she is spending time on homework with her child?
Apple founder Steve Jobs once proclaimed: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Apple gained legions of fans not purely through aesthetics, but because its product design meets customer needs. (Yes, your parents are customers.)
Great design isn’t limited to smartphones and laptops but encompasses websites too. Creating a well-designed school website isn’t just about flashy photos, multi-media presentations and nice colors. It’s also about how well the website works for your stakeholders: the community, staff, parents and children invested in the school. To wit...
Everyone’s got ideas – including us at SchoolNow – about what constitutes effective website design.
Here are five key elements to keep in mind when planning and designing yours:
By useful, we mean get visitors to that next click, quickly and cleanly without a lot of scrolling and maneuvering. Sure a good homepage should look great and be appealing – there are some great templates built into many CMS packages – but if your visitors are lingering too long on your homepage, they’re likely confused. By creating a useful school homepage, you can ensure website visitors get off on a good foot.
Responsive design (i.e., mobile-friendly) is a crucial element of modern school website design. It means your website can be accessed by a wide variety of mobile devices. Good responsive design assures each web page is readable and usable on a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone. It automatically resizes and reformats your pages to eliminate that annoying and time-consuming zooming and dragging that serve as barriers to the viewer.
A school website that incorporates responsive design can be shared and viewed through email links, or social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which more than half of users now access through mobile applications.
Make sure your website features responsive design. Otherwise, if your school website is not set up for mobile users, they won’t be visiting it, much less using it as a regular way to communicate with your school.
While an ADA compliant website has a lot to aspects to determine its accessibility, I will be reviewing the important, basic structure. For comprehensive resources, visit the School Website Accessibility and ADA Education Center.
Ultimately, your website will need to follow the WCAG 2.0 AA standard, see "WCAG 2.1 and what it means for school website ADA compliance" for further information. Some of these items are related to just making sure you complete a couple steps before you publish a web page, and others may require your technical resource to adjust the website template. You can also check out “Creating an ADA-compliant website” by Nicole Bremer Nash for additional details and resources.
The diagram below covers the basic structure of an ADA compliant website.
Two must-read articles for any school going about making their websites fully accessible include: 5 Easy Steps to Creating a School Website Accessibility Policy, and How to Conduct a School Website Accessibility Audit.
Intuitive, organized navigation is well-designed navigation. It’s key to a school website’s usability. That’s why it’s recommended to use the 7-Link rule in website organization. Organize navigation and sub-navigation with seven links. Studies show people are most likely to make a decision when they have seven links or fewer to choose from. Anything more can be overwhelming.
In addition to the ever-popular school calendar, pay extra attention to the popular pages on your site. You can easily determine those through a quick analytics review using Google analytics. Generally, we’ve found these content areas are the top pages on any school website.
There’s much more, of course, to effective school website design than these five elements, but they serve as a great foundation for designing a new website or seeing where your current website stacks up.
Regardless of what criteria you use to determine an ‘award-winning’ school website, it’s important that it be well organized with a killer homepage, be easy to access on the go, and is plugged into the social media landscape. How does your school measure up in terms of effective school website design. Do you have an ‘Apple’ of a school website?
Related article: School Website Design Planning Checklist