A school website has two readers who want completely different things. A parent choosing a school, and a parent whose child already goes there.
The two readers
The first reader visits once, for twenty minutes, and is deciding. They want fees, admission dates, results, facilities, and a sense of whether their child would be happy. In Odisha that peak follows the CBSE and CHSE results, and it is the same fortnight every year.
The second reader visits fifty times a year for thirty seconds each, on a phone, usually to find one thing: a holiday date, an exam timetable, a circular they were sent and lost.
A site built only for the first reader makes the second one ring the office, which is where a school website quietly costs money in staff time.
Admissions is the page that pays
Admission enquiries are the reason a school builds a website. That page should say when the process opens, what documents are needed, what the fees are or how to ask, and what happens after a form is submitted.
Vague admissions pages generate phone calls that a clear one would have answered.
What an admissions page has to answer
- When the process opens, and when it closes
- Which documents to bring
- The fees, or how to ask for them
- What happens after the form is sent
- Who to ring if nothing happens
Notices, and why they belong on the site
Most schools send circulars on WhatsApp and lose them. A notices page with a date on each item means a parent can find last month’s letter without asking anybody.
It also gives search engines a reason to visit regularly, which nothing else on a school site does.
Photographs, and permission
Photographs of children need parental consent, and the consent should be recorded, not remembered. We will set the site up so photographs are easy to change when a family withdraws consent.
Results, and how to publish them honestly
Parents look for results, and schools are often nervous about publishing them. The nervous version, a single line saying the school did well, convinces nobody and reads as if something is being hidden.
The honest version works better: the actual numbers, for the actual year, with the cohort size next to them. A parent comparing three schools trusts the one that shows its working, even when another school’s number is higher.
What it costs and what we need from you
A school site with admissions, notices, faculty pages and a section for each stream or department is a Pro plan: ₹60,000 to build and ₹36,000 a year. That is the tier because a school has more pages than most businesses and changes them more often.
Prices do not include GST.
What we need from you is one person who can answer questions and approve pages. Schools stall more often than any other kind of site we build, and it is nearly always because four people have opinions and none of them has the final say.