As the society’s reliance on the internet continues to accelerate faster than anything seen before, it’s become crucial that schools keep up. Prior to the internet, parents only had the information they were given in person; but now, school’s have the opportunity to give both parents and prospective parents an idea of what their school is all about and what’s going on there. When I was in school, I distinctly remember most school websites as fairly poor as it was (and still is to an extent) very expensive to create and maintain a functional and user-friendly website, but with developments in HTML generation sites such as Wix and Squarespace it’s much easier and cheaper. With this in mind, we take a look at a couple of school websites and see how they hold up to modern scrutiny; a modern website must have fully operational hyperlinks and useful content but many websites take it beyond this with intuitive layouts and navigation coupled with sleek design. Our first example is the
Our first example is the Chelsea Group of Children (CGC), an SEN in Earlsfield which caters for children with mild to severe learning needs. Upon entering the website, the user is immediately struck with a bright splash screen showing images, logo and motto of the school. Upon further exploration, it becomes apparent the CGC website is one of a great calibre; every bit of information one could possibly want about the school is featured including the school’s: history, policies, staff, contact information and blog just to name a few. This is all tied up with an incredibly slick design which has clearly been created with modern sensibility and convention in mind. On the other hand, we take a look at the website for my primary school Our Lady Of Lourdes (OLOL), a two-form-entry Catholic school in Wanstead. OLOL’s website begins in a similar way to CGC with a carousel of images showing life at the school, but the similarities seem to end here. Whilst all links seem to be functional, OLOL fails to provide the wealth of information that CGC did; on top of this, the design looks fairly dated when compared to the modern CGC’s. OLOL’s failure to provide their parents with a sleek and informative website means that even in this modern era the parents of OLOL are not given the access to the school and information on it that technology can permit.
Now obviously, a website has no actual correlation to the education a school can provide; but it does have a huge impact on the impression a school gives and the happiness of the parents. A modern website such as CGC’s provides parents with every bit of information they could want and lures prospective parent’s in by showing that this school really cares about attention to detail. Conversely, OLOL’s website can give the impression that the school does not have adequate technology facilities or parental involvement. Clearly, an up-to-date website is crucial to a modern school; a website can often be the first impression of a school and ergo it’s vitally important that it’s modern, intuitive and functional.