Every school is as unique as its students. From goals to budgets to requirements, your wants from your school’s website won’t be the same as another. Some require complete bespoke functionality, while others benefit from flexible, professionally designed templates.
Despite modern, school-specific CMS platforms blurring the line between template and custom sites, choosing one or the other is essential for a seamless, desirable experience for you and your users.
Ultimately, the best choice depends on your priorities, resources, and long-term plans. However, the following sections aim to provide guidance to make the decision as stress-free as possible.
What Is a Bespoke School Website?
A bespoke school website is custom designed for your specific purposes. Everything from appearance to functionality to features are designed from scratch by utilising high-level design services and custom web development to craft a truly unique site. Consider it the digital version of a tailor-made suit.
How Bespoke School Websites Work
Thanks to their completely customised nature, bespoke school websites offer utmost control over the design, its features, and uses. You’ll work with a team of professionals to create it, which usually follows this process:
- Analysis and specification — You’ll tell the designers what you want, including your goals for the website.
- Initial design — You’ll receive an initial design for you to provide feedback.
- Changes — The designers will take your feedback and make changes until you’re happy.
- Build and testing — After signing off the design, the professionals will create your bespoke website, running it through many tests to ensure it’s working wonders from day one.
- Launch — Finally, the project manager will send you a preview. As soon as you say “launch,” they’ll make it live for students, parents, and the wider community to see and use.
Benefits of Bespoke School Websites
Such websites afford you:
- Fully unique branding
- Utmost design freedom
- Tailored user journeys
- Custom functionalities
Who Bespoke School Websites Are Best For
Generally speaking, bespoke school websites prove best for large MATs, schools with internal marketing teams, those desiring exceptionally unique branding, and academic institutions with advanced functional requirements.
What Is a School Website Template?
A school website template is a professionally designed, pre-built website that’s available for anybody to purchase. You can choose from a set of purpose-built templates, change the colour palette, add logos, and content, making the barrier to entry much lower.
How School Website Templates Work
Off-the-shelf school websites come with already set up content management systems, so you can customise the content, launch, and manage your website with ease. This plug-and-play nature ensures you get up and running quickly, no matter how small your budget or web use experience.
Benefits of Template School Websites
The benefits of template school websites are plentiful, including but not limited to:
- Significantly faster launch times
- Much lower upfront costs
- Professionally designed layouts
- Stress-free content management
- Built-in compliance and accessibility
- Reliable updates and support
- Consistent performance across all devices
Who Template School Websites Are Best For
Due to the simplicity of template school sites, they are best for the majority of academic institutions, such as:
- Primary schools
- Small to medium schools
- Those wanting ease
- Schools without dedicated marketing or technical support teams
- MATs desiring consistency across numerous schools
Modern School Website Templates Are More Flexible Than Ever
As previously mentioned, modern content management systems are blurring the lines between “template” and “bespoke” like never before. CMS platforms like ours, School Jotter CMS, allow incredible uniqueness, even while using a professionally designed template.
Not only can you customise the colours, branding, layouts, and content, but you can also add bespoke functionality where it’s truly necessary, saving money by eradicating forced customisation in non-essential areas.
Beyond this, it ensures consistency and usability for each user, both at the back end and on the main website, ensuring ease and seamlessness for everyone — staff, parents, and students.
Additionally, scalability is simpler. Whether you require more user profiles, extra content streams, or more functions, you can do it stress-free with plugins and advice from our qualified staff.
Bespoke VS Template School Websites: Key Differences
By now, you’ve likely made your choice, but for clarity and assuredness of your decision, understanding the key differences beyond everything already mentioned is crucial to putting your effort (and budget) into the right place.
Design Flexibility
As its name suggests, bespoke school websites provide limitless design flexibility. Without a template in your way, you can let your imagination run wild.
In contrast, off-the-shelf school websites run with a template, potentially limiting the design flexibility. Although, various plugins exist to counteract this potential downside.
Branding and School Identity
Bespoke sites are designed exclusively for your school identity. You dictate the entire user journey, such as how parents/students/staff receive and/or find information. Templates, however, work off a pre-existing layout; you don’t have full control over the navigation or journey.
Ease of Use for School Staff
Template school websites are the easiest to use for school staff, particularly for those who don’t have technical backgrounds or experience. They provide everything you need in an easy-to-understand format, ensuring simplicity for everyone.
Bespoke options are trickier to navigate, requiring professionals to manage the back end to guarantee optimal functioning.
Website Management and Updates
While professional web developers offer management, updates, and support before, during, and after launch, it isn’t something many school administration teams can keep up with. For most institutions, template school websites are more agreeable, as the CMS platform behind the site automatically manages content and performs updates to ensure security.
Accessibility and Compliance
Today’s templates are much better at accessibility and compliance than they used to be, especially when working with a school-focused platform. However, many generic website templates require retrofitting to meet such standards.
Since bespoke websites are built from scratch, developers add the necessary code to guarantee compliance and meet accessibility guidelines as they go.
Performance and Mobile Experience
Bespoke websites outperform templates in mobile performance and speed, due to the existence of only necessary code. Templates can have a lot of “fluff,” increasing load time.
That said, both bespoke and template school websites perform admirably and can respond based on the screen size of the user’s device.
SEO and Visibility
Modern template platforms offer tips and tricks to improve online visibility and SEO (search engine optimisation), making it easy to create content and structure your site for the best results.
Bespoke websites are harder to set up correctly, requiring professional management to ensure your site ranks in search results.
Scalability for MATs
Depending on the platform behind your template, the scaling necessary for MATs can leave a lot of bloat behind, causing long load times. While duplicating is easy, the backend management may feel messy.
With bespoke websites, MATs can easily scale, thanks to their custom structure and foundation that allows for integration of new academies and integration of centralised operations.
Development Time
Template school websites are extremely quick to develop, as the fundamentals are already in place. It’s just a case of customising! Bespoke websites, however, take at least four weeks — if not months — to develop.
Which School Website Option Is Best for Your School?
Both bespoke and template school websites have their place in the field. However, choosing the right one for you means careful consideration of your budget, resources, and outcomes. Unless you’re a MAT, have a dedicated marketing/technical, or desire exceptionally customized branding, school website templates are likely the best course of action, thanks to their lower upfront costs, ease of use, and ability to “plug and play.”
You’ve already found the perfect place to get it — now it’s up to you to select your template and get more eyes on your school!
