Displaying Documents & Policies on Your School Website

Displaying documents and policies on your school website may not be the most exciting or snazzy content to display on your school website, but it’s really important to make sure they are there. These documents and policies don’t need to be updated as frequently as other areas on your website like your news or blog content but that potentially makes the way they’re displayed even more important – they will have to stand the test of time. Visitors are likely to be looking at the same policy page until your website gets re-designed (probably about 3 years) so making sure this page looks and functions correctly is important.

Displaying Policies

We think it’s best to group your policies into categories and display them on your page in groups, rather than one long list of documents for a visitor to try and scan through. We’d also recommend trying to add some sort of styling to the documents, maybe an icon indicating file type or some other design element. Including information alongside the policy such as when it was updated or a description of the document is really helpful to users.

It’s also worth thinking about the functionality to offer your visitors, it’s quite nice to include specific links for downloading and printing policies, and if you can an in-page preview of the document – this has the benefit of not taking your visitors away from the page, and being readily accessible content in the page (OFSTED says this is compulsory with some content*).

Displaying Documents – Powered by Schudio CMS

Displaying Documents

There are some policies that have to be displayed on your website, and other documents that can add provide additional useful information to the visitors of your website. But while policies will need to be updated once a year, other documents on your website could be updated much more frequently. With this in mind it’s really important that there’s a simple way to quickly update documents onto your website. Ideally you should be able to upload a file, provide details of name for it to be displayed with and add to the page, easy as 1,2,3.

The Schudio School Website CMS includes a custom built, dedicated feature to make this process as easy as possible, the Documents Module.

*As defined by DfE – Readily accessible means that the information should be on a webpage without the need to download or open a separate document.