How to Improve Your School’s Website

As the public face of the school the school website can often be a hot topic of conversation in governors meetings (well it is in mine at least). Here’s how to take a comprehensive approach to improving your school’s website.

It sounds daft, but school websites are complex and often have a number of different aims. They can be used to persuade parents to send their children to a school, to help students’ learning, to ease administration and other things besides.

Set your goals for your site and your success criteria. Say you want one of the site’s goals to be to persuading parents to send children to your school. You could then set a success criteria of having your online prospectus downloaded 50 times a month (or whatever figure you like).

Once you’ve set your goals you need a way to see the data. I’d recommend getting Google Analytics installed on your website for this. It’s free, easy to install and very powerful. Your IT team should be able to use it to draw off all the information you need.

That will give you some idea about how your website is doing. For a fuller picture do a little research. This comes in two stages.

Firstly borrow a few willing volunteers sit them down in front of your website. Then work out what the top 10 things this person will need to do on your site, and ask them to do it. So if you’re dealing with parents see if they can find your prospectus, or report an absence or whatever. See how easy they find it, work out what works for them and what needs changing.

The other (complementary) approach is to have a website questionnaire. In the past these used to be quite long, but the tendency now if just to ask a few short to the point questions – did they find what they were looking for, how would they rate the site etc. These can be a useful benchmark of how much your site is actually improving.

With hard numbers and a variety of forms of customer feedback you’ll know what is and isn’t working about your current site. This is the most important step in making it better. Once you know what’s wrong how to fix it should be clear.

If it’s not and you have a few different approaches Google offer a free tool called Conversion Optimizer. It allows you to test two approaches to a page and see which is best. I suspect very few schools go to this level of depth, but thousands of businesses do and I don’t see any reason why schools should be less concerned about providing good learning environments online than businesses are with turning a profit.