School Site Press is a school website design platform you school can use that can be modified to match your school’s branding. On installation, we set up all important information for you! You simply need to add content.
In this article I’ll show you how easy it is to create a school website design using School Site Press and how to prepare your content.
The School Site Press website design for schools demo can be viewed here by clicking here.
Branding & Information
When you subscribe to School Site Press we’ll configure the website colour palette, logo, header and footer info for you. You only need to focus on adding page content and media. Nice and easy heh!
What school every website should include?
You’ll see that the design includes a comprehensive list of items we believe every school website should have.
- Logo
- Links to social media.
- Links to third party websites like Compass.
- Search facility.
- Important message ticker with links to pages.
- Main menu.
- Quick links to the most visited pages.
- Statistics overview.
- News articles.
- Calendar events with links to payment pages.
- Association logos.
- Virtual tour and enrolment pages.
- Footer information.
Example showing Alkira Secondary College website.
Preparing to build a school website
School Site Press comes with the website structure created for you. The website structure (also known as sitemap) refers to the core pages that make up your website. These web pages are organised and displayed in your main menu as follows.
- Home – This is the home page.
- Our School – contains pages about your school, staff, history, term dates, uniform etc.
- Curriculum – contains pages about the curriculum, library, support programs etc.
- Students – contains pages relating students and extra curricular activities.
- Life at School – Contains pages that define what the school is well known for such as sport.
- News – All news articles are saved to this category.
- Events – When you add a calendar event it is displayed here.
- Canteen – This page lists the canteen food options and how to pay.
- Contact – Lists important contacts and address information.
It’s well worth thinking about the pages you want to display on your school before you begin making changes. Having a plan to work to will help keep your school website coherent and easier for visitors to navigate and understand.
- Prepare a list of the pages your site will have following our sitemap.
- Prepare the written content and media for each page in advance.
Uploading Media
I find it easier to upload media and assets to relevant folders in advance of editing pages. Although it’s possible to upload images to the media library on the fly while editing pages, this approach feels cumbersome to me. See this tutorial on uploading media to your website.
Once your media files have been uploaded you are ready to start adding the written content to your pages. If you need to add media to your pages it will already be uploaded and in the relevant folder.
Adding content
Once you’ve added your page content, complete your website by adding news articles and calendar events.
You add the content to your pages using the visual page builder. Our platform uses Divi Page Builder. You can add content modules to your page to create the layouts you want. There are many modules to choose from such as Text, Image Gallery, Audio, Bar Counters, Buttons to name a few.
It’s also possible to re-arrage the content modules by drag and drop. The Divi page builder makes creating page layouts easy and even easier to make changes.
Finally you may need to edit the main menu links to suit your requirements. Click here for a comprehensive list of tutorials.
Once you are happy with your website let us know. We’ll then move your website to a ‘live web hosting platform’. You can then ask your IT person to point the school domain name A Record to our servers and your new School Site Press website will be live. We can help you with this if you’re not sure what an A Record is.
If you need help at any point we are always here to help you. Simply raise a ticket explaining your difficulty and we’ll help you get it resolved asap.
Conclusion
Building a school website can be easy with a dedicated platform such as School Site Press. It’s also essential to have good customer service for when you need it too. If you are interested in moving your school website to School Site Press and would like to speak with someone, please call 0492 869 994. We would love to have a face-to-face meeting via a Google Meeting and present our platform to you.
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