Your school website is more and more becoming a true frontispiece; showcasing the very best your school has to offer to parents, prospective parents and of course OFSTED. Your students are very much a target audience but your primary visitor groups will be parents and prospective parents.

What content are they looking for?

Above and beyond all other content your Term Dates page on average will receive a many as 4 times the number of hits as any other page. Most of us are indeed preoccupied with when we might next get a holiday. The stats stack up to support this fact. There is a strong correlation between providing information that parents want to see and those users going on to view content you want them to see. So, if I make sure that my term dates page is easy to find and easy to read it follows that users will, over time stick around to view more content on my site.

Beyond this parents are mostly looking for information on what is happening in school. We say it regularly; if you get your statutory content in place and kept up to date the main task you need to keep on top of is adding Events and News to your website regularly.

Promote events before they happen and do it religiously. Parents will learn quickly that you are brilliant at keeping this up to date it will become the go to place for information on upcoming events.

Add a News piece which tells everyone what a success the event was once it has passed. Trust us, that will keep visitors coming back time and time again.

Make sure they can read it anywhere!

It’s not a myth. If you make sure the website works on any device your visitors will read your content more. If it is difficult to read then they will leave within 3 seconds of arriving. That’s an official average. If your content is Flash based, it will not work on Apple mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, iPods). Bear in mind that on average 40% of your users will be accessing your site from a mobile device.

Time to get it sorted!

There are very cheap, even free solutions to make this possible and we are always happy to provide some free tips on this. Of course, we would love you to choose one of our packages for your website but if you have the knowhow I promise you, creating something yourself using one of the tools available is infinitely better than your current County provision. Every County provided school website we have seen is clunky, difficult to use, hard to get staff and students to contribute to, awful on mobile devices and turning visitors away in droves. Feel free to challenge us on that!

We’d love to help if you’re stuck but if you’re happy as you are, do have a think about how your site content is presented and make sure that parents can find what they need easily. They really are top of the tree. Want to email me directly? That’s fine. My name is Ian and my email address is ian@schudio.com.