I’ve talked to several hundred schools in the past year and they all want to know one thing — how to design a school website. SmartISD has designed a lot of websites and we’ve figured out the process that actually works.

This article will be posted in three parts:

1. School Web Design from the Ground Up
2. Polishing the School Design
3. Launch the School’s Design

Phase 1 – School Web Design from the Ground Up

So how do you design a school website? Design it from the ground-up. Throw out that old website completely and only refer to it to ensure you are meeting all the needs of the existing website. The last thing you want is to hear “Where did xyz feature go to? I can’t seem to find it anywhere!” The Design from the Ground-Up phase consists of two parts, discovery and design.

Discovery

First things first. Ensure you meet with each group that will be affected by the new school website. Make sure you ask a LOT of questions such as:

• What elements should be on the most important pages?
• Of those elements, which need to be in the first fold of the design? I.E. before you have to scroll down in a normal resolution.
• What resolution should we design for?
• Should the navigation be horizontal or vertical or a combination of both?
• Should the design be accessible? HINT: yes it definitely should be.
• What target audiences will this school’s site be designed for?
• What existing systems will the website need to tie into?
• What colors and fonts should be used?

There might be plenty more questions that you will have, but that is a good start.

Design

Once these questions and any others that come up in the discovery phase are answered, now it’s time to design the website. We use Photoshop, but any graphics editor such as GIMP or Fireworks will work. In this phase we make sure that all the above concerns are met. Once they are all represented in a “Single” design, then we present the design to the school as a flat jpeg image “mockup”.

When I say “Single” design, I mean that. Prior to starting up Web Unlimited and SmartISD, I worked at other web design companies that required that we present three designs to the client and they chose one. The main problem is that 9 times out of 10, the client threw all of them out. They weren’t happy and we weren’t happy AND in the mean time, we wasted a lot of time and more important, creative energy. So I believe one design at a time is a great process.

So based on the feedback from the first school website design, you should go back to the drawing board or just “tweak” it. Then after you’ve completed the second one, meet with the decision makers for the new school website and get feedback again. Hopefully, you will have gotten closer to what the design should be.

Continue with this process until all needs are met by all groups that will be affected by the new school web design. Part 2 of the How to Design a School Website series will cover what to do once the design phase is complete.