Blog 6 – School Web Design – Good and Bad
The first school website I thought of visiting was Sacred Heart Catholic Primary in Roehampton as we had visited this school in Year 1 to see a great example of an ICT suite. They had iPads per student, PCs and Macs, an ICT coordinator who was passionate and a very good ICT teacher. I thought that I’d find an equally impressive school website. But I was wrong. All the necessary information can be found but delving deeper revealed several areas where links didn’t work or they would link to 404 error pages or poorly maintained Google Drive sites. The design itself is very formal and with empty white space, minimal information per page, drop down lists that are too long and image links with no labels. I felt like any parent trying to navigate this would be left frustrated.
Next I ventured to the website of my former school (both as a pupil and a volunteer), Hounslow Town Primary School. I was quite blown away with the difference! The design is much more colourful with features from the actual school integrated into the background giving significant uniqueness. It caters towards children with decent animations of animals and children, yields a great deal of information clearly and without being overwhelming. It isn’t too cluttered, every link worked as expected and it is kept up to date. It’s not confusing to navigate, all the cute animations work without being distracting and is wholly more fun and playful than the previous website. Very much what I would want from a primary school. There is an obvious sense of care and attention present, the designer is clearly very capable! Part of my job as a software tester is to feedback on the design of apps and put myself in a user’s shoes pointing out any issues. Oh, wait. I’ve just found some overlapping text on one of the pages. I take back everything I said! I kid, I was left very impressed by my old school’s website.
The comparison is interesting because I would say that Sacred Heart has a considerably more advanced ICT suite than Hounslow Town. You would expect the websites to be characteristic and probably the other way round. While I would have said that you can tell a lot about a school and its focus from the website, this might not always be the case!
It’s interesting how The Sacred Heart Primary School, a school which has more current technology available for children to use, has a satisfactory e-learning space in comparison to Hounslow Town Primary School. This to me shows that the funding and finance an ICT department receives does not matter unless the ICT department and coordinator is proactive enough to manage the resources effectively.
Interesting direct comparison. You said that Hounslow’s website was designed by someone who’s clearly a very capable designer; would you say it’s worth a schools time to hire a capable designer for their website? This could be a very expensive and time consuming process; is that expense worth the product?
Some interesting observations here. Might you make this post more appealing to the reader by including more hyperlinks and screenshots?