4 Ways to Build a More Creative School Website
A solid small school website encapsulates its mission, values, communities, and instruction style. Once you have built a basic framework to a stellar school website, there are still ways to boost overall creativity and give your site the “wow” factor it needs to stand out in the crowd.
If your school communities, students, and curriculum is creative, you should reflect that uniqueness in your school website! Below we’ll dig into a few design elements and tactics you can implement into your school website to make it more creative.
- Enhance your “About page” content
On your school website, most likely in your “about” page or section, there should be information there explaining why your school is different and stands out from competitors, also known as your “sweet spot”. If you have certain distinctions that make you stand out from the crowd, don’t be afraid to flaunt your uniqueness!
To magnify the awesomeness of your small school, you can make this content more creative on your website by:
- Having a page dedicated to the “Why” of your school. What makes your school special, and how can you convey that uniqueness on your website?
- Have video footage of the principal or another faculty member welcoming parents and explaining the “Why” of your school. Having a faculty member explain your “Why” on your website will feel like a more intimate, personal experience for parents.
- Including new, updated imagery with students doing a variety of activities (more on this below!) Nothing brightens up a webpage more like smiling, happy kids!
- Upload testimonies from happy students, either in video or text form.
- Go even further and provide information on who should apply to your school. Is there a certain type of student that would perform best with your curriculum? This tactic is best for schools with special distinctions like faith-based curriculum, or even students with disabilities who need special education accommodations, etc.
- Update your school website’s multimedia
We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again— nothing beats strong imagery on a school website! If your goal is to make your school’s website more creative, scan through your website’s current photography, videography, infographics, social media, etc. to find gaps in your content that could be enhanced.
For example, keeping your website updated with fresh photography is key to having a website that is more creative. As your school changes over time, so do your students and the activities they do in class. Having photos of students from 2006 doesn’t catch the eye of parents, as we’re in 2022. Photography or even videography of current students working on a cool project, perhaps a robot, digital art, or piece of technology for the science fair, is more modern and up to the times.
- Incorporate Statistics into your website design
Your curriculum and special offerings are what makes your small school unique. If you offer a specific type of curriculum, showing the data behind your instruction style and lesson plans will not only help parents make enrollment decisions, but show that what you are doing works and helps your students.
There are two great ways to incorporate data and statistics into your school website.
- Design your data into infographics, or update your infographics to reflect current data.
- Does the data you reflect in infographics on your school website still match the message your faculty wants to portray? How can you portray that information more creatively that will impress and engage parents? Understand that infographics that prioritize aesthetics (like designed with school color branding in mind) perform better online than plain graphs or data that isn’t easily digestible.
- Layout your statistics up front.
- Numbers are powerful— use them in your design!
- Play with your homepage design
There are several factors that make up a creative school website homepage. From strong imagery to your school mission statement and branding, your homepage is your first impression to the school community and should represent your school at its core.
If you’re looking to spice up your homepage design to increase creativity, there are a few options to consider:
- Play with the layout of your images.
- Perhaps instead of one large hero image (which are great! Learn more about the effectiveness of hero images here), organize a few strong photos that represent your school community in a small collage. Including several images will serve as touch points to interior pages on your school website. For example, if parents see a photo of students doing in-person instruction or small group exercises, they may be more inclined to check out web pages that explain your school curriculum.
- Customize your cursor and build in color transitions.
- While not a huge change, creative small details like your changing website cursor can increase clicks and boost engagements with content on your school’s website. A great way to include a customized cursor on your site is to build in color transitions. For example, if a site visitor scrolls the cursor onto a text block or a photo, the photo could change color or the cursor could change into a small symbol that represents your school. Noticing the change, users will be more enticed to click and thus your site engagements will increase. This is a small element of creativity to add, but site visitors won’t miss it!
- Animation
- Creating subtle animations, whether sections fade in as a user scrolls, or some graphics are animated to draw attention can be an eye-catching and creative approach to website design. Done properly, this can really up the “Wow!” factor on a website. The animated logo on the award-winning website for the Wittenberg University Having Light campaign is a good example of an animated graphic.
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