A typical school website is a staggering monument to the power and versatility of the web. Page upon page of content sits on top of similarly bloated navigation menus, each of the main categories crammed with subcategories, policies, newsletters, and curriculum documents. Letters sit alongside reports. A hierarchy of menus forms an impenetrable jungle that even the most intrepid explorers dread to enter. The website’s sitemap is bafflingly convoluted. The search function throws up a bewildering list of seventeen results. It’s a shame that the user experience is so often curtailed by the sheer volume of material on offer.
This profusion of content is largely driven by a disparate collection of stakeholders all clamouring for their voices to be heard. Schools face pressure from parents, Ofsted, and Governors to publish ever-more content. Over time, this content stacks up, and the website becomes more and more cluttered, growing to meet the needs of the organisation rather than serve the needs of the users, until it is a vast and impenetrable archive of school life.
More is not always better. In fact, the more content you create, the more difficult it can be for your audience to discern what is important. A parent searching for information about a Year 4 trip will be confronted by a confusing range of pages, each containing multiple items of information. A school website needs to deliver information quickly and without fuss, not hide it behind a maze of dropdown menus. For help with Websites for schools, visit fsedesign.co.uk/websites-for-schools/
Many school websites are bloated with content that serves no purpose whatsoever to their audience. At best, this material has been left accidentally or out of habit. Often, however, content is left deliberately to satisfy a governance requirement. At its most extreme, this results in a website that is stuffed to the rafters with material dating back years. The list of items to archive and remove includes:
– Old newsletters and Committee minutes
– Pages dedicated to Policies from previous academic years
– Letters that served their purpose and were never removed
– Pages and pages of archive stories and events
A genuinely useful school website should be a curated collection of the best information the school can offer. This means a laser-sharp focus on providing exactly the right amount of information in exactly the right way. A school website needs to deliver information quickly and without fuss.
So, what causes this problem in the first place? The issue is usually that school websites are mostly run by schools that work by addition, rather than by curation and ruthless editing. New content is regularly added to the website rather than old content being removed, and the remaining material is re-ordered into a more accessible format. This content then sits alongside older material, accumulating over time rather than being subject to regular audits and edits.
