5 practical ways to improve your school website

Robin reviews school websites automatically, and we often check what Robin finds. And so - for our sins - this means we look at A LOT of school websites!

And school websites are… weird and wonderful things…

There are the comic sans primary school websites,

The very-business-like secondary school websites,

And, the pages for school pets!

Looking at all these websites has got us thinking about what makes a school website great. A lot of this depends on the priorities and context of the school, but here are five general ideas.

1: Be cautious about homepage alerts (and don’t forget to turn them off afterwards)

Very often, the first thing we see when we open a school website is a full-page alert.

Homepage alerts are a useful tool for communicating urgent updates, like unexpected closures.

They are great if they are really important to me. But school websites are used by lots of people (current parents, potential parents, pupils, community members) and its rare for an alert to be important to all of those.

People coming to your school website probably have a specific task in mind - and its likely these alerts will slow them down and frustrate them (making them more likely to use a different approach like calling the school or checking things via WhatsApp groups).

Frequent use of alerts can also dilute their impact, as users will automatically ignore and dismiss them. So it’s important to use them sparingly, and make sure they are taken down once they are no longer relevant.

We often also see alerts for past events!

TOP TIP: To check this, you could visit your website in an incognito or private browser, so that you get the same experience as a new visitor or a parent on a new device. Check that any alerts and pop-ups are really needed.

2: Avoid burying key information in documents and images

Every time I want to check the term dates at my children’s school I go through the same silly process:

• Search Google for the School name + “term dates”
• Click through to the school calendar page that is the first link
• From that page, download the term dates PDF
• Open that PDF on my phone
• Find the dates in the document

And I do this a lot!

A common issue on school websites is the tendency to embed important information within PDFs and Word documents. While it might be convenient to upload a document, this can make it difficult for people to access the information they need.

Another common example is when important information is only available within a School Handbook document. This is especially unhelpful when you don’t know in advance that the handbook exists, and includes that information.

TOP TIP: To improve usability, ensure that essential content like term dates and contact details are clearly displayed on the website itself. (This also makes the information easier to find through search engines).

The same idea also applies to images. Schools quite often use images to present tables of information like their performance data, or their staffing structure.

Images can be really useful, but they are also often hard to read and less accessible, including to users who use a screen reader. They also tend to be a bit harder to view on a mobile… which brings us to point 3…

3: Prioritise mobile users

Its easy for office-based staff to only ever look at their school website on a laptop or desktop computer.

But the majority of internet usage now happens on mobiles, and 17% of adults in the UK only use a smartphone to go online!

This means that the mobile experience of your website is critical. Designing websites and content for mobile is also tricky. With less space to play with, information can be harder to find or get lost behind obscure menus.

Some of the school websites we see are not mobile responsive at all, which can makes them nearly impossible to use on a phone.

And documents (especially Word docs.) and images can also be tricky and fiddly to work with on a mobile.

TOP TIP: Put yourself in the shoes of a new or prospective parent, and review your school website using your own smartphone. Think about ease of navigation and the legibility of text, and test the most common things that visitors tend to do.

4: Use plain English and drop the jargon

I was looking at the Key Stage 2 results page on a school website recently and wondered whether any parents would understand what “Combined GDS” is.

Probably only the parents who are teachers.

The page also showed the NOR, DA, PAN, and EYFS GLD EXP… and this is on a page aimed at parents trying to understand how the school is doing!

The school system is full of jargon and abbreviations, and lots of it makes its way onto school websites.

Its easy to become blind to the fact that most parents won’t know that “wraparound care” includes before and after school clubs. They won’t know what DSLs and SENCOs are.

If they are looking for your behaviour policy, they might think it is missing rather than realising you’ve called it the ‘TRT Positive Relationships Policy’ (where TRT stands for The Robin Trust).

This is hard for all parents, but especially those with lower literacy or knowledge of English.

TOP TIP: It’s worth doing a jargon busting sweep of your website - from the homepage and navigation to the names of your policies.

5: Analyse and respond to how your website is used

I’d love to hear from any schools or Trusts that look closely at their school website analytics.

When I’m working on a product, usage data is essential. We look very closely at things like content popularity, sources of website traffic, and the success rate for journeys that we want to support.

A school website is a product in itself. And it’s a very complex one, because it has at least four main use cases:

• A marketing website, to attract new families and pupils
• An information and engagement site, for existing families
• An information website for pupils
• A compliance, accountability, and reporting website

Analytics data can help you check and reflect on how well your website is performing, based on your priorities and strategy.

You can then use the data to make decisions about your website’s structure and content.

For example, if a particular page receives significant traffic, consider adding links to useful related content.

Analytics data can also be useful for checking what is not happening, and trying to work out why.

TOP TIP: If your school often receives phone calls about information that is already on the website - have a look at the engagement on that page. Is it lower than you’d expect? Are Google searches taking people to the right places?

Usage data will allow you to make targeted improvements, and, crucially, monitor the impact.

Conclusion: Be empathetic and realistic

I hope these tips are useful. I think school websites are important, and it can create a lot of workload and confusion when they are not designed well.

In the end these tips are about being empathetic and realistic.

Put yourself in the shoes of a busy parent, who doesn’t know much about the school system, visiting your website on a mobile phone, and looking for something specific. Make that task as easy as possible for them, reducing the number of clicks needed, using plain English, and presenting the information as clearly as possible.

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