Well Designed –
This is the school I went to as a child and then the school I worked as teaching assistant before university. The old website was dreadful so I was pleasantly surprised how much it had changed, including having a look which staff have left! The simplicity is what made me think how well designed it is. It was photos with text to find the most popular links and the navigation bar can be used to find other parts of the website. Like any good website the layout stays uniform throughout so finding the navigation bar when moving onto another page, it is easy to find and get back to where the homepage is.
Purpose – I believe the website works well for its purpose to be read by children and adults. The ease of navigation is a great advantage. I particularly like the integration of class blogs as many schools are still playing catch up and have not recognised the importance of blogging for the children and parents/carers to see what their children are doing.
Communication – The quick links to newsletters and the preview feature for the newsletter pages allows you to read it quickly or click to download it to then read which I really like.
General Layout and Text/Colour – The grid format makes the information easy to look at and to scan the website to find the link you want. The text is an easy font to read and the colours are based on the school badge (which I still can picture in my mind) and is used well throughout. The colour contrast nicely so it is nice to look at.
Poorly Designed –
This is the school website of the placement school I was in first year. I chose this website because it is too busy and hard to read colour scheme wise in my opinion. Being totally honest I found it difficult to find a badly designed website and I would say mostly I can navigate it fine, however the busy look and hard to read colour scheme is a pet peeve of mine.
Purpose – It is quite fit for purpose however for children to be navigating the website I think they would struggle. Other users like parents/carers, especially those are not used to navigating websites, could have difficulties of finding the information they want.
Communication – I believe the busy look does not give a great impression of the school. There’s too much information: the twitter feed, news, images, videos, text everywhere across the page, the scrolling text, calendar dates. That much information is FAR too much to process, especially on the homepage!
General Layout and Text/Colour – With text everywhere, scrolling and static with images, it is not great. There is a navigation bar which does appear on each page and quick links of “Admissions” and “Ofsted” are useful too. The text/colour is not optimal because the background is blue, so is the text. The two main colours are yellow and blue, which would fine with it did not clash with each other due to the mass of information. A more simplistic view would be more beneficial to children wanting to use the website, as well as those less-experienced with navigating websites.
Conclusion –
From looking at various school websites before choosing these two, I could see how children may be wanting to use the websites as well as parents/carers. Because of this simplicity is key, even as an adult and very experienced with navigating websites, finding the information you want needs to be easy and not scanning across huge amounts of information, especially on the homepage. The homepage is the first thing you see and it gives the vital first impression of the whole website. If something is cluttered then I would think the school is the same, throwing vast information at you and it is hard to take it all in. First impressions are key because as most schools have a website, potential parents with children could be looking at the school’s website before sending their child there.