5 things to consider when building a school website

Schools are special places – not just somewhere for the children of your community to learn, but a part of that community in their own right. You probably take great pride in your school and want others to feel the same. That is an ambition perfectly assisted by a well thought out and carefully crafted website.

To help you in that quest, therefore, here are five suggestions about what you might consider when building your website.

1. Putting your school on the map

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A website is one of the best suited ways of putting a place on the map – both geographically and figuratively. Of course you know where it is, but do others too? Of course you know what values your school embodies and the image you want to project, but do others know and share those values?

You may have a sense of your school being a part of the community it serves, but for the wider community to recognise that inclusivity you might want to indulge in some positive marketing. A website may help.

2. Keeping parents in the picture

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Perhaps your biggest audience is the parents of the children you teach.

With careful website design you may be able to ensure that parents are kept completely up to date not only about general school events, trips and holiday dates, but a readily accessible guide to the progress being made by an individual child.

The skills for providing that accessibility may not be immediately available among your teachers or staff, so you might want to consider approaching specialist website designers such as Schoolscool for expert help. They have a range of software packages designed to enable clear and easy communication between schools, staff, parents and students, during and after school hours, for example.

3. Classroom support

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All the strengths and benefits of a school website may be realised in the classroom itself.

A professionally designed website has the potential for providing support in the classroom, not only as an aid for teachers and teaching assistants but also to free up some of their valuable time for building relationships with those who matter most – the children in the class.

Lesson plans, the chore of daily record keeping, notes on past successes and future plans may all find their place in a carefully crafted school website – and prove an invaluable form of classroom support in the process.

4. Learning material

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A school website may become a portal that opens many doors. It might carry the very learning material that is intended for use in the classroom or at home by your pupils.

The particular learning material you choose, of course, remains entirely within your control and you may similarly want to include outbound links to other material for your learning-hungry charges.

The BBC, for example, has its own e-learning website called iWonder.

5. Saving you time

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Imagine the new opportunities and horizons that might lie within the grasp of you and your teaching staff if you were to free to slash the time spent on day to day management and some of the organisational challenges in running a school. Your school website has the capacity for doing just that.

Technology may revolutionise your capacity for putting your school on the map, keep parents in the picture, provide timely classroom support, extend your library of learning materials, and manage the valuable time of your teachers and staff. You may be able to keep abreast of this cutting edge technology by taking advantage of a specialist in school website design and software provision.

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