The Internet impacts our daily lives more than in one way. It influences every business and field - even the education system. So, whether you like it or not, you still need to adapt to changes.
We’ve all visited badly designed education websites once or twice. They are the ones responsible for killing our motivation and enthusiasm for study and research. It’s always easier to pinpoint a bad design, but what do you need to do for a good school website? And why is it even important? Let’s get your questions answered with this article.
The Importance of Education Website Design
It’s pretty hard to identify the target audience of educational websites. Different people need those for different reasons - future and current students, professors, parents, job applicants, those who seek knowledge or search for information, etc. This makes school website designing quite an interesting and complex task as you have to consider all the users’ needs beforehand.
A good-looking website is not enough - it should consider the overall user experience. Let’s imagine a future student who searches for contact information on your website but can’t find it because you’ve written it on one page only. Or a parent that can’t navigate through your website because it's not optimized for mobiles and they spend all their time on resizing the pages instead. Will they return to your site? Surely not. In fact, 38% of visitors will not interact with a website if its design is unattractive. That’s why it’s essential to spend some time creating a good layout and optimizing your education website. And here are the best tips for your website design and development.
The Best Tips for Creating Good Website Designs
We’ve collected the best tips for attractive and optimized education websites. Try to use them when creating your website and you’ll get astonishing results.
1. Create a “Practical” Homepage
A practical homepage is often more useful than a good-looking but empty one. You want to present your highlights right on your homepage - without clashing too many things together. Try to keep it simple but informative.
The following rules will help to ensure your homepage is practical:
2. Provide Only Accurate Information
Your website represents your educational institution, so it’s obvious that you have to avoid all the mistakes and disinformation. Once it goes live, the damage can’t be undone - your users won’t appreciate a mistake in your content. Especially if you want to conduct custom software development’ later, you will need to have clear data as a fundament.
Make sure to thoroughly check your content for any misspelling or inaccurate information before posting it on your website. Also, if you’re using a certain method for communication and support such as VoIP software, don’t forget to include contact information as well.
3. Use Informative Videos
Visual materials are often perceived easier than texts. While the text is essential for your content, try to think about how you can utilize videos in it. While you can hire a copywriting agency to do the job, you will need some additional help with video content. There are many cases when a short video is more informative than pages of letters.
You can use videos for different situations:
Visual materials are also great for emotional content. Demonstrate student experiences or how nice your teachers are. Show cool and interesting places in your institution and attract more visitors.
In addition to this, you will also need to spread the word about your website.
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These days, email marketing is an integral and essential component of every business. EasySendy is an all-in-one email marketing solution that allows you to carry all your various marketing channels together and accelerate traffic, a higher conversion rate, and better ROI for online geeks, marketers, small businesses, and startups. In addition, you can easily design email templates for your campaigns.
4. Have a User-Friendly And Responsive Design
Make sure to have an easily navigable and responsive website for greater results. Your website must allow you to swiftly navigate back and forth between pages. Meanwhile, responsive design is a key factor for modern websites. Having a responsive website means that each page of your site is usable and readable both on a desktop and on a mobile. It automatically readjusts its formats and sizes to avoid annoying the users.
Many platforms, like Squarespace, automatically make your website mobile-friendly. You can also trust this task to professionals and try to find a company that’s developing web and mobile applications instead.
5. Keep The Page Loading Time Low
In this fast-pacing world, people are short on patience. So chances are very low that they’ll wait for your pages to load. If you clutter your website with too much information, it’ll most definitely slow down.
There are several steps for minimizing the loading time of your page:
To optimize your images and content, cache your web pages, reduce redirects and try other techniques to make the loading time of your pages faster.
6. Use Well-Designed Forms for Data Collecting
Data collecting is an essential part of every business: B2B businesses have a sales contact list, for Google marketplace shopping platforms there are custom surveys, while B2C companies use customer reviews. Meanwhile, education websites can use surveys to collect data from students.
Many institutions use forms for applications, medical forms, and event registration. But you won’t generate leads if your forms aren’t well designed.
Consider using the following tips for a better-looking form:
7. Use SEO Optimization
Yes, your education website should be informative and attractive for your users. But first, they need to find you online. This can be achieved with search engine optimization tools.
There are many SEO tools you can implement with your content. The natural use of SEO is essential for every successful website. You can find SEO specialists to take care of it or find affordable SEO training for a better understanding of the topic.
8. Make It Colorful
We’re sure you’ve already heard how popular minimalism is for websites. And while it’s true for most cases, education websites slightly differ from this trend. Many people perceive information divided into colors easier. Colors are also a great way to show your values to your users.
According to your logo colors, choose a color scheme and use them for your content. You can also more vibrant colors for your call-to-action buttons.
9. Make It Accessible for Everyone
Most educational institutions are targeting students from abroad. It means that different people can stumble on your website for relevant information.
Converting local users into customers is hard, persuading users from around the world is harder. You have to appear credible so even your high prices will be justified.
In design, you have to consider a few things:
10. Keep It Flexible
Your website should always be able to keep up with changing trends and programs. Try to use different ways of telling your stories to avoid boredom among readers. To figure out which information layout works best, a lot of testing and optimization is required. The concepts are the same whether the website is for a college or university or a teaching website. Trends come and go, but the audience should remain interested. Always keep in mind that the information in your design frame may need to be rearranged.
Conclusion
The website for your institution is the most significant digital tool you have. Designing a website might be time-consuming, but it's necessary if you want your educational institution to succeed. Any specific design can be challenging, but don't be afraid of it. Any institution or university that you may find on the internet has solved all of the issues. We hope you've gained some useful school website design ideas from this article. Hopefully, these 10 essential website design tips have been useful to you.
