International School Websites

Get your team together

Make sure that people who will contribute to the website are on-board from the beginning - let them help to decide on the kind of website that you require. You may have a grand vision of an all singing and all dancing website but it may be prudent to start with something less ambitious. A good, clear and up-to-date website is far better that one with lots of links to pages that haven’t been updated in years. Enlist the help of experts and enthusiasts from your teachers, parents and students. You may need some policy decisions on privacy issues for example so enlist members of your board of directors. Remember that if you choose to use our website design service we will be a part of your team from the earliest stages.

Articulate your mission

An International school website needs to articulate your school's mission statement. You need to try to illustrate the kind of school that you are - and the kind of school that you aspire to be - on your website. Photographs can bring a school website to life. Pictures that show children actively involved in learning are worth a thousand words. It is your opportunity to show happy, engaged students using the facilities of which you are rightly proud.

Make some decisions

• what kind of website do you want?...read more
• when do you want your website up and running, when can you test your website?
• who will be responsible for getting your website on the web and who will be responsible for maintaining it? who will test it?
• how much time, energy and money are you willing to invest in your school website?

Prepare for the implementation

Schools generally have a lot of materials available that can be used for the content of a website. These may include existing publicity

Decide on what kind of photographs you will have on the website – you may already have built up a stock or you may need to collect more. Make sure that your photos match with your privacy policy. You may need to encourage people to take photos of particular events or facilities in use.

Do make use of your current good practice. Do you send a newsletter home to parents on a regular basis? Why not publish that on the website? Remember that you can publish a photo gallery on your website of colour photos – something that is not easy with a photocopied newsletter. You can use one to enhance and complement the other.

Where a larger document is published (a handbook or newsletter for example) the use of Portable Document Format (pdf) documents is recommended as it allow you to publish with a relatively small file size at the same time as guaranteeing that users will see the document as you intended. PDF files can be read by anyone with the freely available Acrobat Reader software.
...read more about good practice for website design