Mentone grammar quicklinks5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() This all-boys school’s homepage features a bright and inviting collage of photos on a roomy grid ( see card layout) with rotating images and teaser headlines pointing to upcoming calendar events. ![]() The school website features a well-organized video library, with comprehensive overviews of the lower, middle and high schools, respectively, and many vignettes featuring alumni, parents, staff and current students. In a very competitive market with many good options, Summit takes an almost business-like approach to telling its story, including a page that touts customer satisfaction results from both student and parent perspectives. This gem of a day school in Cincinnati uses student progress and achievement in a compelling way on its homepage to herald its 125-year anniversary – a mark few schools can boast. Although the main navigation is quite intuitive and well thought out, a prominent search window cashes in on the preferred way people tend to seek information these days. It’s important to make your school’s leaders accessible, and a blog is the perfect forum in which to do that. One of things I like about the quicklinks menu is a link to the blog by the head of school. A strong social media emphasis, including an about page laid out in Pinterest fashion, makes it natural to engage with this site. This 1,100-student school is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year in the high desert, and its website reflects a grasp of not only history, but the power of modern online communications. ![]() Here's my top 10 private school website designs: Albuquerque Academy In addition, an overall simplicity should permeate your site design (think Apple products) quick links and frequently accessed information – news and calendar information, for example – should jump out at you. Also, high-quality feature images (more faces the better, right?) and videos score high points in my eyes. This best-practice formate allows website visitors to determine what order they want to read the content. Many of today’s savvy school websites are taking a queue from the commercial websites that feature a grid approach and card layout (think Pinterest), that relies on scrolling to create a descending order of priority that schools want to use for their messaging. Visitors should also be given many opportunities to engage via your popular social media channels. Because your website needs to be ‘readily’ viewed on any number of mobile devices, a clear, well-organized navigation is critical to being compatible with responsive frameworks. Responsive design (adapting to any mobile device) and social media integration are driving many of today’s best designs. dTop 10 private school website design criteriaīesides avoiding the seven fatal mistakes in school website design, all of the schools in my top 10 do several things right. Whether it’s getting more students or – in some cases – improving the quality of the enrollment, schools are employing the full mix of communications tools, and a solid website is at the heart of their efforts. While to a degree some public schools are competing for students in the school choice/open enrollment landscape, private schools have to attract the students and families they need to survive. Next to cranking out stellar graduates, enrollment marketing is a top priority for private and independent schools faced with the economic pressures that won’t be relieved by that next tax levy or DOE grant. What makes great website design even more critical for private schools is that they are under more pressure to create compelling websites, for, frankly, they are in a much more competitive environment than their public school counterparts. Like the article I recently wrote on the top 10 school district website design examples, this one’s for the private school administrators who’ve decided they need a new website and want to review some of the best and brightest out there. In the spirit of fairness and equal time, I’ve pulled together 10 examples of some private and independent schools who really have it going on when it comes to their websites. ![]()
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