School Website Design
A school website serves two audiences at once. Prospective parents are judging whether this is the right place for their child; existing parents need term dates, letters and uniform rules quickly. Most school sites are built for the first and quietly frustrate the second every single week. Prospective parents also read the site as evidence of how the school is run. Broken links, last year's dates and an empty news page say something no prospectus can undo.
Built for primary schools, secondary schools and independent schools. Describe your business in a sentence and a complete site is written and designed for you — then you edit every word of it.
Build my website free →What a school website needs
Every one of these is included from the first draft. Nothing here is decoration — each answers a question your visitors are already asking.
Admissions, clearly explained
Dates, catchment, how to apply, open days. This is what prospective parents came for and it should never take three clicks.
Term dates and the calendar
The single most-visited page on any school site. It belongs one click from the home page, every year updated.
Curriculum by year group
What children actually learn and when. Parents compare schools on this more than on prose about values.
Staff and leadership
Names, roles and how to contact the right person. Parents waste time when they cannot tell who to ask.
Letters, policies and forms
The practical archive that existing parents need. Being easy to search here saves the office hours of phone calls.
Real photographs of the school
The building, the grounds, children working. Prospective parents are trying to picture their child there.
Three mistakes that cost school websites customers
These come up again and again in this trade, and all three are avoidable.
- Burying term dates, which is the page parents visit more than any other.
- Admissions information that is out of date the moment the year turns.
- Pages of values statements with nothing concrete about the curriculum.
- Policies published as scanned PDFs that cannot be read on a phone.
- No clear way to work out who to contact about what.
- No search on the site, when parents are usually hunting for one specific letter or form.
Six school designs to start from
Every industry ships with six distinct designs. Pick one as a starting point — the layout, colours, wording and images are all yours to change afterwards.
How you get your school website
Describe the business
One or two sentences about your school is enough. No brief, no questionnaire.
Get a complete first draft
Pages, sections, images and written copy — not an empty template waiting for you to fill it in.
Edit anything, then publish
Change any word, section or colour yourself. Publish to a free address or connect your own domain.
School website questions
What is the most important page?
Term dates for existing parents, admissions for prospective ones. Everything else can be a click deeper.
How much detail should admissions carry?
Dates, criteria, catchment, the application route and open day dates. Every unanswered question is a phone call to your office.
Should staff be listed individually?
Leadership and year leads at minimum, with the right contact route. It saves parents and staff a great deal of time.
How do we handle policy documents?
Publish them where they can be found and searched. Scanned PDFs are hard to read on a phone and invisible to search.
Can we update it ourselves?
Yes, and you must — term dates, letters and news change weekly, and waiting on a developer is why school sites go stale.
What about photographs of children?
Only with the consent your policy requires. Where consent is limited, photograph the environment and work instead.
How often should the site be updated?
Weekly at minimum during term. Parents treat the site as the school's noticeboard, and a stale one quietly moves them to email the office instead.
Build your school website today
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