The education guide: a website for three audiences at once
An education website is three websites wearing one address
It is a marketing site for prospective students and parents, an information service for current ones, and a back office that the team has to keep current without filing a ticket every time a course changes or a snow day closes the car park. Projects go wrong when the brief only describes the first one.
What the site has to do
Recruit, which means course and admissions pages built around what applicants search for and the questions parents actually ask. Inform, which means term dates, policies and updates reachable in two taps on a phone at the school gate. And publish, which for schools includes the statutory information Ofsted checks the website for before the inspection team has got out of the car.
What to put in the brief
The course or year-group taxonomy, decided early, because it shapes everything and is miserable to change later. The statutory publishing list and who owns keeping it current. Photography and consent arrangements, because education photography has rules and the good sites lean on real images heavily. And the systems the site must talk to, from MIS platforms to open evening booking.
What to measure
Open day bookings, prospectus requests and applications. Findability of the statutory content, which one parent-testing session will establish. And how long updates actually take the office team, because a site they can run is a site that stays alive.