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If you are planning a new school website in 2017, then we are the best placed provider of school websites for the education sector.
Choosing the right company. Not just another website company.
Smart School Websites designed its’ first school website in 2011 for St Bede’s Primary School. Previous to this, both directors worked in a high performing secondary school in the north of England. Dominic was the Business Development Manger; this role included all elements of parent and community communication and strategically marketing the school and sixth form, hiring out school facilities including sports, conferencing and events.
David was the Media Designer – working closely with Dominic to redesign and maintain the school website in 2004, the role also included supporting and redesigning websites for feeder primary schools.
Dominic and David worked together on producing marketing materials such as prospectus, promotional videos, course guides and advertising print. They also used to teach national curriculum subjects to sixth form students (CISCO and Level 3 Media respectively) as well as Community Education IT and Marketing classes to small business and the community. After gaining invaluable sector experience working together for over 6 years Dominic and David pursued a new venture by setting up Inspirar Business Support Ltd (later renamed as Smart School Websites).
Development Process
Dominic and David personally work closely with our schools during the design process. Engage with the steering group/web team. Discuss ideas, what will work, what won’t work (and why, plus alternatives). We discuss who is going to use the site and why. Confirm structure and layout, discuss design elements, and sketch out initial ideas.
We then work quickly to develop digital versions of initial ideas. This can take the form of anything between 1 and 6 potential layouts depending on previous discussions.
Once structure and layouts are confirmed we begin the development process. We set up the development site on a staging server. This allows you to view the development and feedback to us. We can limit access to the staging site by IP address to maintain confidentiality. We begin writing the desktop, mobile and tablet designs for the homepage and content pages into website layouts while simultaneously creating the site structure by adding pages, menus, categories and users.
Credibility
To date we Inspirar have presented at the Education BETT Show in London, supported an international school to be finalists of an International School Marketing Award, and Dominic also sits as a Trustee Board Member of an Academy.
Ofsted requirements are key to any website and our site structures are guided in part by Ofsted. We keep abreast of current guidelines, and work closely with Ofsted inspectors that we partner with. When Ofsted, or DfE requirements change, we inform all of our schools.
A recent example of this was when the DfE announced that governor information has to be displayed in an easy to access format (HTML rather than doc/pdf). We looked through all of our schools and found only two didn’t meet the new criteria.
We changed their governor sections immediately and then sent all of our schools an email outlining the changes and that each of our sites met the new criteria.
Performance
We maintain user performance by regularly using analytics to capture visitor information. The reports available are digested and a dashboard report is emailed weekly, containing information such as new/returning visitors, location, devices, engagement time, referring sites, entry and exit points, duration of visit, most popular pages. This service even provides real time monitoring. We provide the login details for Google analytics and work with schools to tailor what the report includes.
We agree review times with the school and then look over the data to make sure key engagement areas are getting the desired traffic. If this isn’t the case then we look at how we can increase traffic to those areas – do we need to add call to actions to the homepage? Can social media help build traffic? Can eNewsletters and push notifications also help?
Recently we redesigned a school homepage based on analytics data, this allowed us to produce a homepage that showcased the most popular areas of the website and therefore created an easy to use landing page for the most popular pages.
We offer our secondary schools unlimited hosting and bandwidth. In most scenarios we use a dedicated, rather than shared, server approach for secondary schools.
Security
Security is a journey, not a destination. We implement a ‘test and retest’ approach. We review our systems and setups on an ongoing basis. There is no ‘set it and forget it’ security setup for your school or website. Hackers are always on the prowl, and we all need to be ready. Remember that no system is 100% secure. We follow steps to keep your school website safe to limit the potential of the site being hacked.
Administration
Our CMS is designed to support development if the school requires a new design/re skinning. Colour schemes, page layouts and even the homepage may require freshening up. All of the content, however, has already been created and therefore is unaffected. This approach allows designs to be changed without impacting on content.
We have completed new website projects in as little time as 4 weeks in the past. We often estimate a website to be ready in two-three months. The design & development process takes approximately one month. Providing the school can approve all design and content (including supplying new content) within an agreed time frame we can confidently deliver on time with exceptional customer service.
Contact us on 01325 481141 or email contact@smartschoolwebsites.co.uk if you would like to discuss a new school website or we can be of help in any way.