The best school websites are designed to function like the best teachers in the classroom. They help to guide the visitor to the places that they need to visit.
A good teacher does not present students with all of the information necessary to complete a task simultaneously. Instead, the teacher makes decisions about what content to present and in what order. More than the knowledge of the subject, the skill of a teacher is in how to structure the content of a lesson so that the students can acquire knowledge that they would not be able to obtain without the teacher.
The best school websites work on the same principle. Most school websites, however, do not work according to this principle.
The typical school website presents information the way a filing cabinet presents its contents – organised by category, available on request, and requiring the visitor to know what they’re looking for before they can find it. The information on these websites is generally divided into categories like admissions, curriculum, and governance, and is often located several clicks from the homepage of the website.
It makes considerably less sense to a prospective parent who has arrived at the website with one unspoken question: is this the right school for my child? For Websites for schools, consider https://www.fsedesign.co.uk/websites-for-schools/
What does leading look like in practice?
The homepage is different from the others. While the majority of websites include the welcome from the headteacher of the school buried below the news ticker and the banner that lists the dates for the new school term, this homepage is different from those in that it answers the question of who the school is and why the visitors to the school should care about the school before requiring the visitor to do anything else.
This design appears to be more related to the visitor’s journey rather than the school itself. Each visitor to the school will have different needs at different stages of their visit to the school. Each of these different needs can be provided through the website; each stage of the visitor’s journey can be reflected in the website.
The school’s content builds a case progressively, rather than depositing all of its information at the beginning of the text. The school’s values are more persuasive after they have been presented to the audience than before. The school’s exam results are more persuasive after the curriculum philosophy is presented to the audience than if they were presented in isolation. Each of these sequences contributes to the argument of the text.
And it looks like a website that knows when to stop. The filing cabinet never knows when to stop – there is always another policy to upload, another news item to add, another committee minute to publish. The teacher knows that more content is sometimes the enemy of understanding. The lesson that tries to cover everything teaches nothing as well as it could.
