The Differentiated Independent School Website

What makes a school website differentiated ?

Differentiated can refer to a website standing out as different or appealing to different parent profiles.

Anything can make a school website different – that’s not the point.

• Firstly, you have to able to find it – there are lots of school websites you can’t even find on the search engines!
• The school website must stand out from the very first page with a differentiated design and offering – too many websites are messy, awful colours, say the same as 90% of other schools and are not even designed for their target audience
• Navigation and content are critical – does it contain everything a parent wants? Can the parent get to what they want in no more than 3 clicks?
• The school ethos must come over instantly and effectively – most Head’s intros are samey, bland and a cure for insomnia. Video can often solve the problem if scripted well and professionally filmed.
• It’s often best to build the proposition round a theme – most schools are too small to effectively create a brand, but it should not stop you from building a consistent image of what you want to represent
• Most school websites are first and foremost for marketing and therefore have but one objective – to get the parents to visit – ensure you have a big bold flashing call to action on every page.
• Quality images are essential – this is not a job for staff with their digital camera – get a professional and manage their brief – use the staff taken pictures for the News sections – make sure every picture has relevance to the content it supports
• Describe and visualise your end objective – for a prep, it’s usually about getting the children into top senior schools – for a senior school, it’s usually elite or specialist universities
• Don’t forget functionality – 1. An Alumni section which helps you raise funds, 2 An eLearning section, 3. A pupil reports section, especially for boarders, 4. A gallery to aid viral marketing 5. A public benefit section to show what you are doing for the public if you want to retain charitable status.
• It’s all an utter waste of time unless you get “relevant parent traffic”! – Few web developers have any experience of SEO for schools. Speak to us about organic and paid search plus links from relevant third party sites.

These are but a few observations. We are school marketing consultants and not web developers. Our expertise is in recruiting pupils. BUT we also design websites – differentiated websites that achieve objectives. We formulate the differentiated concept in collaboration with you, we specify outline designs, we write content (if you want) and we then work with a developer to implement it. We have a joint venture with Ignition UK who specialise in school websites, but at the end of the day, we work with whichever firm you instruct and indeed your internal IT department.

If you would like a free - no obligation evaluation of your own website or simply a chat about differentiation please fill in this enquiry form

Here are some examples of work done by us and Ignition.

www.hurtwood-house.com Large Boarding School

Hurtwood House is the UK’s largest residential sixth form college. This website is a very large, complex site intended to illustrate Hurtwood’s premiere position in the performing arts. There are lots of moving graphics and video.

http://www.campbellharris.co.uk/

Campbell Harris is an independent college situated in the heart of Kensington. Students have been achieving excellent results here at GCSE and A level, in an informal but highly professional atmosphere, since it was formed in 1992.

http://www.dukeofkentschool.org.uk/index.html Modest size prep school

Duke of Kent wanted a fresher and modern look to their website which previously had some non relevant imagery and navigation problems. It’s a relatively low cost project which is livened up by the audio recording of the school concert.

http://www.davidgame-group.com/ London Sixth Form College

David Game College was experiencing a lot of CMS problems with their existing site. We needed to give them control of their own content. The existing image library was quite poor and a large part of the project was to get the imagery right and coupled to relevant content. There are quite a large number of independent sixth form colleges in London which all compete with each other. Therefore the website had to differentiate David Game, part of which was achieved by revolving images and straplines.

http://www.best-schools.co.uk/ School Directory & Choice Website

Best-schools.co.uk is our own biggest website, recently relaunched with futureproof technology. We wanted to follow the “it does what it says on the tin” philosophy and thus it is intentionally kept simple with clear navigation and no pictures to distract. Notwithstanding this there is a lot of software operating behind the scenes manipulating the huge database which puts up 12 different league tables and the details of every UK independent school.