Discover 10 key considerations for creating a school website that’s easy to navigate, accessible, engaging and built to support your school community.
A school website has a lot of jobs to do.
For prospective families, it may be their first meaningful interaction with your school. For current parents and students, it’s a practical resource they return to throughout the year. For staff, it needs to be a reliable platform for publishing information and keeping the school community up to date.
That makes designing a great school website more complex than simply creating something that looks good.
The best school websites balance clear communication, intuitive navigation, strong visual design and straightforward content management, while accommodating the needs of several very different audiences.
If your school is considering a website redesign, here are 10 areas worth thinking about before the design process begins.
One of the biggest challenges with school website design is the number of audiences the website needs to serve.
A prospective parent researching schools has very different priorities from an existing parent looking for a term date, a student accessing information, or a staff member updating a news article.
Before thinking about layouts or visual design, identify the key audiences for the website and what each of them needs to accomplish.
These might include:
Understanding these audiences helps determine everything from the navigation and page hierarchy to the content and calls to action.
Rather than organising the website purely around the school’s internal structure, consider how information can be organised around the people actually looking for it.
Schools often accumulate a significant amount of website content over time.
Programs, curriculum information, policies, enrolment information, news, events, staff profiles, resources, facilities and community information can quickly create a large and complicated website.
A redesign is an opportunity to reconsider that structure rather than simply transferring the existing website into a new design.
Good information architecture should help visitors understand where they are, where they need to go next and how to find important information without relying on the search bar.
Navigation labels should be clear and predictable, while high-demand information should be given appropriate prominence.
Before redesigning a school website, it can be valuable to audit the existing content and identify what should be retained, rewritten, consolidated or removed.
For many schools, attracting prospective families is one of the website’s most important roles.
The website should make it easy for someone unfamiliar with the school to understand its values, educational approach, programs, facilities and community — and then know what to do next.
That doesn’t mean placing an “Enrol Now” button everywhere.
Instead, think about the full journey a prospective family might take.
Someone discovering the school for the first time may want to learn about its philosophy and programs. From there, they might explore facilities, read about student life, investigate fees or catchment requirements, book a tour, attend an open day or submit an enquiry.
A well-designed school website connects these steps naturally and provides clear pathways towards the appropriate next action.
Parents aren’t necessarily visiting your website from a desktop computer.
They may be checking an event time while travelling, finding a phone number at school pick-up or reading an announcement from their mobile.
Prospective families may also discover and research your school primarily through their phones.
Responsive school web design therefore needs to go beyond simply making a desktop layout fit a smaller screen.
Navigation, buttons, forms, tables, documents and page content should all be considered in the context of smaller screens and touch interactions.
Important information should remain easy to find and use regardless of the device.
Education websites serve broad and diverse communities, making accessibility an important consideration throughout the project.
Accessibility isn’t something that should be added at the end of a school website redesign. It influences decisions around colour contrast, typography, navigation, content hierarchy, forms, interactive components, imagery and the way content is written and published.
Good accessibility practices can also improve the experience for everyone.
Clear headings make long pages easier to scan. Strong colour contrast improves readability. Descriptive links make navigation clearer. Logical content structures help visitors understand information more quickly.
Considering accessibility from the beginning allows it to become part of the website’s design system rather than a collection of fixes after development.
A school’s website is one of its most visible brand touchpoints.
The visual experience should therefore feel connected to the school’s broader identity rather than like a generic education website with a logo added to it.
Colour, typography, photography, illustration, graphic elements and layouts can all help communicate the character of the school.
The goal isn’t necessarily to make the website visually elaborate. It is to create an experience that feels distinctive, credible and consistent with how the school wants to present itself.
Authentic photography can be particularly valuable. Showing real students, educators, facilities and activities can communicate far more about school life than generic imagery.
The website should also work cohesively with other communications such as prospectuses, enrolment collateral, signage, social media and digital campaigns.
The website isn’t finished once it launches.
School staff will need to publish news, update events, change program information, replace documents, create pages and maintain content long after the initial website development project is complete.
The content management system (CMS) therefore deserves careful consideration.
A good CMS should make common publishing tasks straightforward without giving editors so much unrestricted control that the website gradually becomes inconsistent.
Structured content can be particularly useful for education websites.
Instead of manually designing every staff profile, event, program or news article, these can be managed as reusable content types with predefined fields and layouts. This makes publishing easier while helping maintain consistency across the website.
For larger or more complex education organisations, a headless CMS such as Sanity can provide additional flexibility. Content can be managed independently from the website’s front end, structured around the organisation’s actual content requirements and potentially reused across multiple digital experiences.
The right solution ultimately depends on the school’s content, publishing workflows, integrations and longer-term digital requirements — rather than simply choosing a CMS because it is familiar.
A school website rarely operates completely independently.
Depending on the organisation, it may need to connect with enrolment platforms, learning systems, calendars, newsletters, payment systems, employment platforms, directories, portals or other third-party services.
These requirements should be identified early in the website planning process.
Some systems may require a direct integration, while others may simply need to be linked or embedded. In other cases, information may be better managed centrally and displayed automatically on the website.
Understanding these requirements before design and development begins helps avoid unnecessary manual processes and ensures the website architecture can accommodate them properly.
A visually impressive school website isn’t particularly useful if it is slow, difficult for search engines to understand or frustrating to use.
Performance should be considered throughout design and development, particularly around imagery, video, fonts, scripts and third-party integrations.
Search engine optimisation should also be incorporated into the website structure from the beginning.
For schools, this may include making it easy for search engines to understand the organisation, location, programs and important content, while ensuring prospective families can discover relevant pages through search.
If an existing website already receives organic search traffic, a redesign also needs to account for existing URLs and rankings.
Changing page addresses or removing content without an appropriate migration strategy can result in valuable search visibility being lost after launch.
Planning redirects, metadata, page structures and content migration before the new website goes live can help protect the visibility the existing website has already built.
A website redesign shouldn’t be treated as a project that ends permanently on launch day.
Schools change.Programs evolve, staff change, new facilities open, enrolment priorities shift and the questions families ask can change over time.
The website should be able to evolve with them.
Analytics and search data can reveal how people actually use the new website, including which pages attract visitors, where people leave, what they search for and which pathways lead to enquiries or enrolment actions.
That information can then inform future improvements to content, navigation and user experience.
Technical maintenance, CMS updates, accessibility reviews, SEO and ongoing content improvements should also form part of the website’s longer-term plan.
A strong website provides a foundation that can continue to improve rather than remaining unchanged until the next major redesign.
There isn’t a single template for the perfect school website.
A small primary school, an independent secondary school and a multi-campus education organisation may have completely different audiences, content requirements, systems and internal resources.
What they do have in common is the need for a website that makes information easy to find, communicates their identity effectively and can be managed confidently over time.
That means a successful school website redesign should begin with understanding the organisation and its users before decisions are made about layouts, technology or individual features.
At Spacey Studios, we work with schools and education organisations across website strategy, UI and UX design, website development and ongoing optimisation. We can also help determine the right technology and CMS approach for the organisation’s requirements, from more traditional website platforms through to flexible headless solutions such as Sanity.
If you’re considering a new website or planning the next stage of your school’s digital presence, get in touch with Spacey Studios to discuss your project.
Whether you’re refining your brand, improving your website or looking to grow your business online, we’d love to learn more. Share a few details with us and we’ll help you explore the next steps with clarity and confidence.