It can be a busy time of year but you can bet September will be even more hectic! If you do have a little time now to spend updating your school website it will be one less thing to worry about over summer. We’ve collated 5 of the most popular updates we see being made on our school websites. We hope this will help you ensure that your school website hits the ground running in the new academic year.

1) Review old content and photos

A sea of content can make it difficult for parents to find the information they need. Purge out of date pages, newsletters and letters to parents. While you’re at it, why not have a quick flick through the pages and see if there’s any other content which is out of date or superfluous?
It’s likely that your pupil photo permissions don’t cover pupils who are no longer at the school. For GDPR compliance, now would be a good time to remove any photos of leavers.

For Schools using Greenhouse: Don’t forget you can easily disable a page using the CMS to stop it appearing if you’re not sure about deleting it.

2) Welcome back note

You can look super organised by penning a welcome back news item now and scheduling it to publish on your website just before you return to school.

For Schools using Greenhouse: Any page or news item can be scheduled to appear on your website by using the scheduled publishing option in the ‘Dates’ tab.

(Click here for more great ideas for News Items)

3) Diary dates

If you haven’t already it would be a useful head start to add in the key dates for next year into your website. As a minimum, ensure the term start and end dates for the whole upcoming academic year are in place. Some parents prefer to have a full list they can download and print so why not add a pdf or Word version too?

For Schools using Greenhouse: Adding dates as diary dates in the Greenhouse CMS will ensure they appear across the website and on you home page in your diary date panel if you have one.

4) Statutory content

Groan, we know. But it’s the law. Double check you haven’t missed any of the recent new requirements added earlier this year. You can download our checklist from the Ofsted checklist page of our website.

5) New parents

Why not help new parents by creating a page dedicated to them with all the documents, FAQs and key information all in one place? Go the whole hog and add a quick link or button on the home page so they can’t miss it when they visit the school website. Encourage new parents to download the school mobile app if you have one.

For Schools using Greenhouse: Create a special group in your mobile app for new parents so you can send targeted push notifications of important reminders at the start of term.

 

Finally

If you have a website with us and have forgotten how to do any of these things, don’t forget we offer unlimited support; Just give us a call or email and we’ll quickly help you out.

If you’ve not yet discovered the benefits for your school of a Greenhouse School Website please contact us to find out more.

 

Now go find that bucket & spade!

This post was originally appeared in 2013 and has been re-written and brought up to date.