Guest post by Murad Bushnaq, Founder and CEO of Morweb
Your website is the face of your school-associated organization, and a well-made one can drastically improve your ability to connect with potential supporters and engage your current audience. However, building an effective website for your school can require spending many hours researching design tips and gathering analytic information, especially if your team lacks web design expertise.
While most supporters increasingly expect organizations they support to have modern, sophisticated websites, creating a dynamic, beautiful website is a more attainable goal than you might first assume. Even if your organization is operating on a budget—like many school-associated organizations are—you should be able to design and launch a website that allows your school, parent-teacher association, or other scholastic organization to support, inform, and interact with users online.
With years of working alongside hundreds of nonprofits, associations, and educational groups, Morweb has built websites for colleges, high schools, and other school-associated organizations. To help you get started building your new website, we’ve put together five key tips specifically for organizations in the education sector, including:
Find an affordable, intuitive website builder.
Make your mission clear.
Ensure your website is accessible.
Identify key features to include.
Prioritize easy maintenance and updating.
Your organization should be able to implement each of these tips into your website with a bit of work and research. However, if you find yourself in need of additional advice or help, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional web design agency that can answer all of your organization’s specific questions about your website.
1. Find an affordable, intuitive website builder.
Some website builders are more effective than others for different professional sectors. Schools have specific needs, and not every website builder supporters them to the same level. While each organization will have its own priorities for what its website needs to accomplish, here are a few key features to look out for when assessing different school website builders:
Multimedia support. Images and videos can quickly inform your visitors about your organization and programs. For many school-related organizations, sharing resources such as educational and how-to videos is a necessity. Assess potential website builders on how well they support these features and how they accommodate the slow loading times that multiple images and videos can cause. For instance, some website builders will automatically compress images, which decreases the file sizes and speeds up page load time.
Customizable layouts. Your website builder should give your team options. If your team lacks experience designing websites, check out website builders that come with multiple school-specific templates and prioritize ease-of-use for frontend designers.
Mobile optimization. If you’re running a parent teacher association, your members already have full-time jobs and will likely need to use your website while on the go. Many website builders have mobile options, but be on the lookout for one with automatic mobile optimization that prioritizes usability and fast loading times.
Additionally, be sure to assess potential website builders’ security. Some platforms perform regular security updates for all websites they support, while others leave it up to individual organizations to protect themselves. If your team is less experienced with cybersecurity or would prefer to limit the number of responsibilities your team takes on, make sure to find a website builder that takes care of security issues for you.
2. Make your mission clear.
If you accept donations, recruit volunteers, or encourage website visitors to participate in your organization in any way, you’ll need to make sure your mission is straightforward and easy to find. Remember that your mission isn’t just a summary of your organization, but an external-facing document that new web visitors will want to see.
A clear mission statement is especially important for fundraisers and donation drives as supporters will want to know how their contributions are making a difference. You can ensure that supporters will find and understand your mission on their first visit to your website by:
Creating a clear navigation system. Your website will have a few core pages that the majority of visitors will navigate to at some point while browsing your website. For many organizations, these will include donation, services, and about pages. While getting creative with website design can create a new and positive experience for visitors, it’s best not to experiment with your navigation and ensure users will find your mission exactly where they expect to.
Branding all additional websites and other online marketing materials. Your website hosts your mission, but all additional websites and platforms (including microsites and social media) should also be branded to your organization and offer a brief explanation of your mission. As this guide explains, there are numerous fundraisers school-related organizations can host, and all of them benefit from presenting your mission as clearly as possible.
Using images and videos to demonstrate your mission. A plain text description of what your organization is and what your goals are is necessary, but sometimes, videos and images can help supporters visualize your services and role in education more clearly. For example, if your organization helps schools manage after school programs, you might feature photos from past programs you organized.
Your mission will also be conveyed through other elements on your website outside of your mission statement. For example, the first piece of text on your website will form many visitors’ first impressions of your website, so carefully consider your homepage’s title, subtitle, and descriptive text.
3. Ensure your website is accessible.
The best organization’s websites reach the widest possible audience by implementing accessibility features. Accessible websites improve the user experience and allow visitors using screen readers and other assistive technologies to engage with your content. You can make your website accessible by including the following features:
Video captions and scripts. Videos are an effective way to break up text and get your organization’s message across in new ways. However, not every user can watch videos or rely on their audio. Subtitling your videos with closed captions or providing a separate script helps these users interact with your video. Similarly, providing captions and alt text for images can also help visitors understand what your images are displaying and why they’re important.
Meaningful text hierarchy. Dividing your content up by headers helps keep topics organized and prevents visitors from getting overwhelmed by big blocks of text. Make sure that your headers follow a sequentially-descending order with no skips between them (e.g. heading four appearing before heading three). Otherwise, readers using screen readers may get confused since they typically tab through the different headings to understand what content is grouped together on the page.
Legible text. Text can be unreadable if it’s too small, lacks sufficient color contrast, or is in a hard-to-read font. Use a legible font for the bulk of your page, and save fancy fonts for titles if you decide to use them. Ensure your site builder allows users to resize text up to 200% and adjust the page to greyscale to improve color contrast.
When performing website maintenance, make sure to include accessibility checks, especially for new content. Doing so will make sure all of your visitors are able to use your page and help you quickly catch any minor slips that might occur during website updates.
4. Identify key features to include.
Rather than thinking of your website as a collection of pages with text and graphics, try contextualizing it as a place where users accomplish specific tasks. After all, users don’t visit your website to read text; rather, they read text to learn about your organization.
The features you choose to include on your website will shape your users’ experiences and how they go about completing their tasks. Exactly what those tasks are will vary depending on your organization. CommunityPass’ after-school software page outlines a few common features school-related organizations’ websites should include:
Registration forms. School-related associations and any participant-based programs need to manage registrants and members, collect fees, and attract new participants. Your registration forms should be as streamlined as possible to encourage additional signups and include time-saving features such as automatic payment reminders and collection.
Merchandise store. Whether you’re selling event tickets, merchandise for your school’s sport team, or school supplies, an integrated storefront lets your organization quickly update its catalogue of items, adjust prices, and collect payments.
News page. Regularly updating your website signals to supporters that your organization is healthy and still operating. Plus, maintaining an active posting schedule looks good to search engines, too. Rather than producing brand new content pages every week, your organization can keep a news page or blog that updates supporters on recent events or provides them with new information about your school or organization.
You can monitor how effective these features are at assisting visitors by monitoring analytics. The analytics tools within your website builder will allow you see which pages users are navigating to and how they’re finding your website in the first place, helping you identify things your website is doing well and places where it can improve.
For example, you might discover that your email campaigns are the most effective way to reach supporters, but that your registration forms are experiencing a higher rate of page abandonment than you prefer.
5. Prioritize easy maintenance and updating.
Your organization likely has a lot of tasks to manage, and updating your website can easily fall by the wayside during busy periods. Outdated information and content can lead to bigger problems down the road, which take even more time to fix. Thus, designing your website to be as easy to maintain as possible in the beginning can save your team from many future headaches.
As mentioned, a website builder that handles security maintenance for your organization can reduce your team’s workload. However, it’s likely your team will still need to install security updates for integrations and other features. Checking how updates impact your most valuable pages is still a must. In most cases, no significant changes will be necessary, but it never hurts to confirm it.
Establish a website maintenance routine early on, and assess how many of the tasks can be completed through easy frontend updates. If too many maintenance jobs require looking through code on the backend, you might need to consider how you can start simplifying features.
Designing a new website takes dedicated time and research. Many organizations go through extensive user testing as well to make sure visitors are likely to use their websites as intended. However, with the right website builder and a clear, user-friendly design, your website can make a positive impression on each user, boosting your organization’s image as both credible and trustworthy.
About the Author:
Murad Bushnaq is the Founder and CEO of Morweb. Since its inception in 2014, Murad has acted as Creative Director and Chief Technologist to help nonprofits spread their vision online through engaging design, intuitive software and strategic communication.