What’s the best way to achieve this? Here’s 10 things to consider designing into your home page.

1. Add the School name & logo

It seems obvious but make sure your school name is displayed prominently on the home page. Often your school name is displayed alongside the school logo.

But you can be more creative.

2. Position your school with a description or strap line

If it’s not obvious from your school name what type of school you are, or your phase, qualify your name prominently.

Perhaps you have a specialism that needs highlighting?

Or a strong ethos?

3. Use photography

Happy children doing interesting things. There’s no more powerful way to portray your school. Professional photography definitely helps and also allows you the opportunity to let the pictures do some of the talking with a large gallery header. A gallery in the header also adds interest to every page of your website.

Or an alternate could be a static header with a feature gallery nearer the centre of the home page.

If your photography is not quite as good, you might not notice if the images are smaller – a montage can help make a feature.

4. Welcome

A strong welcome from the head will really help introduce the school and its’ strengths – and a photo adds a personal touch. If you wish to be easier to find in google, don’t forget to include some keywords here.

5. News & Events

News & events are most commonly aimed at current parents, but it’s worth remembering that prospective parents and other visitors can get a good flavour of the sorts of interesting things which happen day to day in your school, not to mention your successes. So don’t include too many news items about parking! Open days and other events for prospective parents can also be included here.

And if you have the resources, why not add interest to your news items with a little photo?

6. Channel your target audience

If you’re particularly looking to capture the interest of prospective parents, then why not use some of the home page to allow them to easily find what they need. Or what you’d particularly like them to see. This might take the form of some nicely designed prospectus or admissions buttons.

7. Make navigation easy

The worst thing you can do is frustrate your visitors with quirky navigation or hiding content in non intuitive places. A well thought out and logical structure will help, along with adherence to standard navigation conventions. You can always help your visitors though by placing quick links on the home page. These can be targeted at a mix of current & prospective parents or staff.

Or you might consider a ‘super nav’ for current parents & staff which shows at the top of every page.

8. Video

If you have one, a video clip can really introduce the school. You could embed it onto the home page so visitors can play it on the home page.

9. Social media

A Twitter feed is not just a great way to keep interested ‘followers’ updated about the school. It’s also an easy way to update the school home page from your phone. A Facebook page could also be linked to, or perhaps a Facebook like button added.

10. Other Ideas

A nicely designed ‘noticeboard’ is useful for highlighting news or making important announcements stand out.

You could a feature panel to highlight something you’re particularly proud of.

How about highlighting a quote form Ofsted?

In fact, there’s no end of ways to ensure your home page is engaging and informing.

Here’s a selection of other websites we’ve launched:

Logo update

After a design briefing with Darren, the underlying theme which emerged was one of modernity underpinned with solid tradition. In this spirit, the first thing we did was to redraw the school logo. As common with many schools, the logo was a pretty ropey jpeg, handed down for generations… This gave us (and the school) a clean logo we could do interesting things with.

The new website

The next step was to prepare a draft design of the website home page. The website should not just appeal to prospective parents but should also provide easy access to essential information for current parents. With tradition the watch word, the school colours were perfect – a rich dark green with gold highlights. We ensured used these colours were used prominently, yet delicately, and as the school had some great photography we placed a large photo slide show in the header. Large photo headers are great for showing happy children doing interesting things and also for Cathedral School, their close ties to the Cathedral.

We pride ourselves in listening very carefully to what schools tell us and shown below is the first draft of the new website.

We were close, but the image in the footer was perhaps a little ‘aggresive’ being a Knight with a sword… It was swiftly changed and our second draft was as you see the website above.

From here, it was a simple task for us to take all the content Darren supplied us and all the pages and menus to the new website. We then provided Darren with access details to our easy to use Content Management System (CMS). Darren picked it up straight away and didn’t even require our usual introductory training.

The new prospectus

Next stop – a new prospectus. We already had the look & feel we’d developed from the website, a newly redrawn logo and great photos. With some text from Darren we were able to provide a draft prospectus for review. Naturally there were a few changes and particular attention was paid to choosing just the right photos. Finally we suggested some particular paper and finishing which really makes the prospectus stand out. The result is stunning. And of course, every prospectus comes with a ‘page turning‘ prospectus for your website.

The iPhone app

Finally, Darren was an early adopter of our new iPhone app. Current parents can now receive the latest news, diary dates and photo galleries all in one convenient place. Prospective parents can also get a taste of what goes on in the school, the school branding is re-inforced and the modern, forward thinking nature of the school is underlined.

It was a pleasure to work with Darren at Cathedral School. Darren said:

“Thanks Andy you made the whole process very easy being both professional and patient. We are over the moon with the website and prospectus, which met the brief perfectly. Special thanks for the app which is a real winner with our parents. Highly polished products at value for money prices.”

Here’s a selection of some purple websites from our portfolio:

Splash Page

The first thing a visitor sees when visiting either website is a common ‘splash’ page which immediately introduces the Federation and allow visitors to choose the school they wish to view, or to log into the VLE. Even better, this page automatically lists the next upcoming diary dates for each school as well as providing a free form ‘Notice board’ area which each school can keep up to date using the CMS.

Common Layout, Individual Design

By keeping a common layout but applying each school’s individual branding, we were able to retain the character of each school but pass on time saved redesigning the layout as a cost saving to the schools. Another advantage is for parents who may have children at each school or have children moving up to the Junior School. They will welcome a familiar navigation system and layout.

Integrated Blogs

The schools were really keen to prominently feature their year group blogs on the home page. They already had a blog using Blogger, and by tagging each post with a year group, we are able to automatically update the home page with the latest blog from each year group along with an eye catching thumbnail image. So all the school has to do is blog as normal and the home page is kept up to date!

Some other examples of linked schools are:

Wetherby Schools

Falcons Schools

Deben High School, Orwell High School, Felixstowe Sixth Form

Full details are available on our website:

http://www.greenschoolsonline.co.uk/AboutUs/Web-Design-Job/

However, there are some simple guidelines that apply to every website:

1. Great design – the design positions the school. A clear interface helps parents use the site (assuming that’s the primary audience)

2. Good, targeted content – well written content that’s clearly signposted and if it can be broken down into digestible chunks, so much the better

3. Regularly updated – recent news items, school calendars, image galleries etc.

Things to avoid include:

• too much content, especially on the home page
• not enough photos (they’re great for adding interest to a page)
• launching a site then never updating it
• ‘over-design’ i.e. something that’s so involved it becomes very difficult to update, detracts from the content and dates very quickly.

You can read more about this topic on this blog post at Education Executive.

Podcasting might sound like the domain of advanced techies but all you need is some basic IT and something to talk about. Jodie Collins explains how it works

Podcasting used to be something I only heard about during Chris Moyles’s breakfast show on Radio One. I thought it was something just for radio DJs.

That was only two years ago. Now it is a word I hear daily, and not from the radio. I hear it at my school from other teachers wanting to use it as part of a lesson or assessment. I hear it from other schools via Twitter or at conferences. Podcasting has become a part of daily life at many schools. Children love it and teachers do not have to be experts in order to blend a podcast into a lesson.

In its simplest form, podcasting refers to any sound file saved to the internet so that people can listen to it online anywhere in the world and, if there are many episodes, subscribe via an RSS feed, which syndicates content automatically.

It sounds technical, but for the person making and uploading the podcast it is wonderfully easy and – more importantly for schools – cheap. All you need is a microphone, a computer, an account on a podcast site and internet access.

At my school, our first foray into the world of podcasting coincided with the launch of a school radio station, but they do not have to go together. We put our podcasts online via the free London Grid for Learning service, but there are many other free sites.

We copy our podcasts and add them to the playlists on the radio station for within school, while those outside our school can access the material via the web and subscribe to our podcast channels. Our podcasts range from early years children singing nursery rhymes and telling stories to Year 6 children making multi-layer jingle tracks using Audacity, the free editing software.

I first used podcasting with my Year 5 class two years ago, when we were studying the performance poetry unit within literacy. By listening back to recordings of their poetry readings, the children were able to adapt and improve their performances, making their poetry more interesting for the listener. They then put these skills into practice when performing their final class poem for a video, which we uploaded along with the podcasts on to the school learning platform. Until children hear themselves they often have no idea of whether or not they are providing a good level of emphasis for the reader. Podcasting is useful in these situations.

Our next unit was persuasive writing, and, as the children loved podcasting so much, we decided to use it again. This time it was more complex: the children had to make adverts. They had to write the adverts and produce a script for radio. They then used Audacity to record their script and add backing music and sound effects.

The result was some professional podcasts, turning some very average-looking scripts into really persuasive adverts which everyone in school loved listening to. We even had a vote for the best advert on the learning platform, with a prize for the winning group. One of the benefits of using podcasts was that the less able writers in the group were still able to make a valuable contribution to the project.

Year 1 also used podcasting in their traditional tales unit. After a whole-class podcast production of The Gingerbread Man, each child wrote and recorded their own version of the story. This captured their imagination and the teachers were very impressed with the results.

Through our Getting Into Literacy project (www.gettingintoliteracy.com) we have showcased our podcasts and other multi-media literacy work to the wider community and the children have even more motivation to use podcasting.

We now have an after-school podcasting group, which interviews other children and teachers in the school, a roving reporter who updates us all on school trips and other activities, maths tutorial songs and many more adverts for our summer fairs and Saturday school.

As well as being a fun and exciting tool for children, podcasting can also serve a practical purpose for teachers. I spoke to Richard Goucher, an advanced skills teacher at Bristol Brunel Academy, who has been using podcasting as a means of assessment in maths.

His Year 7 pupils are doing a mid-term numeracy assessment where they have to test a hypothesis: do teachers drive small, silver cars? They conduct a survey, analyse the results and draw a conclusion, but the main part of the assessment is to produce a podcast explaining what they were doing, the maths they used, what they found out and if the hypothesis was correct or not.

To introduce the work, resources are available via the school’s virtual learning environment. These include a podcast produced by Mr Goucher as an exemplar piece of work, so that they have a model of what is expected of them.

Pupils are responding well to the podcast; they can listen in their own time at their own speed, and get the idea that they must explain in small steps and be concise in their explanations. It is a nice way of assessing how pupils explain maths.

Jodie Collins is ICT co-ordinator at South Rise Primary in Plumstead, south-east London

PODCASTING TIPS

- For e-safety purposes, make sure children only include their first names on podcasts or use pseudonyms.

- If you have a VLE this is a great place to showcase work, as well as on the school’s external websites via an RSS feed to the podcasts.

- Be creative with podcasts – listen to some online to find the variety out there. You really can podcast anything.

- If you are an LGfL school in London, you already have access to a free podcast site at www.podcast.lgfl.org.uk

- Schools without a current service can sign up to www.podbean.com for a free account.

- Microphones do not need to be expensive but a USB one will give clearer sound – you can find them for about £15.

This article orignally appeared in the TES