Education Website For Your Business

What an Education Website Has to Get Right

Education websites serve several audiences who want quite different things from the same site: prospective students or parents deciding whether to apply, current students and families needing day-to-day information, and often staff and governors as well. Trying to serve all of them from one undifferentiated homepage is the usual failure.

Separate "considering us" from "already with us"

A prospective parent wants admissions criteria, open days, results, ethos and fees. A current parent wants term dates, uniform lists, absence reporting and letters. These are different journeys and should be signposted separately from the first screen.

Institutions that get this right field dramatically fewer routine phone calls, because the day-to-day information is where people expect to find it.

Admissions information must be unambiguous

• Entry criteria and how places are allocated
• Key dates and deadlines, kept current
• What the application process involves, step by step
• Fees, funding, bursaries or scholarships where applicable
• Who to contact with questions, by name where possible

Out-of-date admissions dates are the most damaging content error an education site can carry, because they are the pages people rely on most.

Courses and curriculum need real depth

A course listing with a title and two lines helps nobody decide. Explain what is studied, how it is assessed, what it leads to, and what a typical week looks like. This is also what prospective students search for, so the depth pays twice.

Accessibility carries particular weight in education

Education sites serve a genuinely diverse audience including people with disabilities, older devices and limited bandwidth, and in many jurisdictions public-sector education sites are under explicit accessibility obligations. Proper contrast, keyboard navigation, real text, captioned video and downloadable documents that are themselves accessible are baseline requirements rather than refinements.

Safeguarding shapes what you publish

Photographs of students require appropriate consent and a clear policy. Staff contact details need thought. Safeguarding and child protection policies must be published and easy to find. These are not design questions but they constrain the design, and they should be settled early.

Mistakes worth avoiding

• Term dates and admissions deadlines left from a previous year
• Key information locked inside PDFs that are unusable on a phone
• One undifferentiated homepage serving prospective and current families equally badly
• Course pages too thin to support a decision
• Policies that are required to be published but cannot be found
• Photography used without a clear consent position

An education website works when a prospective family can assess you properly, a current family can find what they need in seconds, and everything with a date on it is actually current.