Are you wondering what it takes to create an inspiring school website design?
Schools invest a lot of money developing their school website and rightly so. A school website is often the first place parents will look when deciding which school is best for their child. So it’s important your school website inspires!
Inspiring School Website Design
Inspiring school website design inspires your visitors and encourages them to want to know more! That’s why it’s essential to have a great looking site that is easy for people to use.
Below are a list of items to check when designing your school website.
Clean Design
The layout and presentation of information on your school website must be easy to understand and logical. You want to include the most important information ‘above the fold’. This terms refers to newspaper printing where the most important articles and information is above the fold.
Large, easy to read sections help break up a page content and render well on desktop, mobile and mobile. Don’t be afraid to use white space to give the eye a brake from large blocks of content.
Colour Scheme
The colour scheme for your school website should be on brand and relect the colours used in other mediums like your brochure, uniform etc.
You can break down your colour scheme in the following way:
- Primary Colour
- Secondary Colour
- Accent Colour
- Body Text Colour
- Body Text Link Colour
- Background Colour 1 – White
- Background Colour 2 – Pale Grey
- Background Colour 2 – Dark
A great website for creating your own colour palettes is https://coolors.co/ Check it out!
Example of nice colour scheme.
Animations
Animations are a great way to add life to your school web design. Scrolling animations look good and give your page design some dynamics. Bear in mind though, that animations add extra javascript to your page load times and too many could make your ite load slow on mobile.
Menu Structure
I’d say that school website menu structure is the most important part of its design. Visitors / parents to school websites want to get to information in 2 clicks or less. Before you get carried away with design, first focus on your school website menu. Think about what should be top level menu items and what should be categories
Call To Action
Important pages on your site such as the home page require clear calls to action sections. A good call to action tells your visitor what they need to do next. Ideally they should have a single action you want your visitor to do.
Example: Click to register your interest.
School Tour Videos
It’s quite common now for schools and colleges to have tour videos on their website. As tempting as it may be to include the tour video on the home page I would advise against it. Videos (even those hosted on YouTube) take time to load in. To have a video at the top of your home page could be annoying for existing parents to keep loading when they simply want to access content from the website. I would advise a link to a separate page for your school video.
Summary
You can see that creating an inspiring school website isn’t too difficult. It’s always worth taking a little time to think about the menu structure, information hierarchy, colour palette, design elements and menu structure. If you’d like to know more about our school web design platform ‘School Site Presss’ click the button below to schedule an online meeting.
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