The Keys To Engagement And Connection

When you want your students, their parents, and your alumni to be engaged and connected to your school, there is one key step you need to take. You have to prepare your school’s website to be a mobile-friendly school website design.

More and more people are switching from laptops and PCs and going to their mobile phones for internet searches. Mobile phones are convenient and easy to use and almost everyone has one.

This upgraded mobile-friendly design should also help you with SEO rankings. It is vital when you want great communication with parents, students, and alumni.

What Is Mobile-First Design For A School Website?

When website developers design for PCs first, it is called backward design thinking. This type of design effort does not encourage the designer to focus or create innovations that would work on mobile phones.

To do a mobile-first design for a school website, the web designer first designs the website for mobile phones and then moves on to the bigger electronic devices like notebooks, laptops, and PCs.

This technique is designed to help designers to focus more on what they are doing and be more creative with their innovations. With a large number of the population using mobile phones, schools that want to upgrade older websites or build new ones should consider this newer technique.

Why Is Mobile-First Design Important For Schools?

There are a lot of benefits a school will receive from doing their website in the mobile-first order. Here are just a few of the most important benefits:

1. There Is An Improved User Experience

When you design for mobile phones first, you are providing the mobile phone internet user with better optimization as well as a well-thought-out experience.

This helps capture the attention of those using their mobile phones to peruse your website. The improved and easier-to-use experience keeps them onsite longer.

2. Accessibility

With a mobile-friendly school website design parents and students can access the school’s website from just about anywhere they happen to be. Plus, you are broadening the target audience as you include disabled and other mobile phone users who may not have access to a PC.

Also, the features like voice commands help drivers and other busy people to turn unproductive time into productive time using voice commands.

3. A Better Website Performance

The better you design your website for mobile phone use, the better the experience for the mobile phone user. Navigation buttons will be easier to use and the website’s loading speed will be more attractive to mobile phone users.

A mobile-first design does help your SEO ranking.

4. Scalability

When you do a mobile-first design, you will find that it is easier to make adjustments for larger screens like PC monitors. Also, it is just easier to add website elements to a PC than it is to remove them to fit a mobile screen.

How To Adapt Your School Website For Mobile Devices

1. Optimize Your Website For Loading Speed

It has been proven that if the web page loading speed is improved by even as little as 0.01%, conversion rates go up by almost 10%. While that applies to retail applications, the improved speed will help your school’s website visitors be in a better frame of mind when they communicate with you.

Loading speed improves the user experience and helps them get to the information they are looking for faster. You want to make sure your website loads up as quickly as possible to keep your students and parents happier.

2. Use A Responsive Design

If you are not sure what a responsive design is, this is a design that automatically detects the device the visitor is using and adapts the page to fit their smaller screen.

You want a responsive design as search engines like Google give higher rankings to websites with this type of design. If you want to be seen, this is one way that helps you get noticed.

Plus, the responsive design integrates with other features on your website quite well. This adds to a seamless user experience that benefits everyone.

3. Keep Your Navigation Simple And Intuitive

Ease of use and a good user experience depends on your navigational design. If buttons cannot be found or touched, then the user will not have a great experience with your website.

To create a great mobile user experience, you have to make sure the navigation is easy to find, easy to use, and very simple to understand. Keep it simple applies to this issue and it will help with your mobile website design.

4. Use Large Fonts And Buttons

A very important topic as smaller fonts and small buttons make it extremely difficult to read your website as well as do any navigation throughout it. It is a nightmare to try to read very tiny print so when you design your website to be mobile friendly, use as large a font that works.

The same goes for your navigational buttons. You do not want them so small that the user cannot use their fingers to push. Nor should they be so small that your website visitor pushes two at the same time. Have your designer select the right sizes for both items.

5. Make Your Content Easy To Read And Scan

When it comes to school websites, you are not trying to impress parents, etc., with your technological know-how. You want them to get the information they are looking for fast, simple and have it easy to scan. Making the site easy to read achieves those goals

Some Additional Words

When you have decided to create or upgrade your school’s website to make it a mobile-friendly school website design, contact us. We have years of experience in experience in web design and can easily do the mobile-first website design for your school. Call us today to see how we can improve your school’s website.

Go Where Your Target Audience Can Be Found

It used to be easy to find your target audience. You could put an ad in the newspaper or a giant billboard up for all to see. Or all you need to do is advertise in the right magazines.

Today reaching your target audience is a bit more difficult. They are spread all over the internet on a variety of social media platforms or they may not be there at all. But if you are looking to increase your school’s enrollment then you need to incorporate social media marketing in your school web design.

What is The Role of Social Media in Enhancing School Web Design?

One of the most important roles social media has when incorporated into your school web design is that it fosters engagement. Your students and their parents can feel part of the school through this strategy.

Another important role is that adding social media to your mobile-friendly school website design is that information is easier to share. Students can pass along vital school information to their friends a lot faster and easier.

It makes for a better user experience and allows everyone connected to the school to know what is going on. Plus, the school can showcase its products, schedules, and activities, as well as make communication better between teachers and parents.

Incorporating social media in your school website design is helping the school go where its target audience spends most of its time. That makes communication run smoother and people get the information they need before it is too late.

Social Media’s Impact on School Web Design

The biggest impact social media has on a school’s website design is that it filters out extraneous information and helps you define your school and its brand a lot more coherently.

The social media platforms help you develop a voice for both the website and your social media accounts. The two are not necessarily the same. Plus, social media usually has its own set of goals created by the school.

These goals may differ slightly or vastly from the goals you have for your regular website. This extra set of goals helps you define your school in much easier-to-understand terms.

In addition to that, the social media impact means that your regular website should be mobile-ready. Most people access websites through their mobile phones and being social media-ready means you have taken care of two birds with one stone.

Social Media Boosts Enrollment via School Web Platforms

This is a positive result that should be expected. When you design your website to go where your target audience spends its time, then chances are you will increase enrollment.

Social media participation says a lot about your school to your target audience and gets them interested in what your school is all about. With over 57 million social media users in the UK alone, you have a large audience to reach.

Going where your audience is the premium strategy for any school that wants to increase enrollment and be seen as a successful academic institution. What helps accomplish this goal is that your social media marketing can be more targeted.

It also provides key information for those people searching for information on a specific school. This type of marketing has been described as similar to a shop window open to the street.

People get a glimpse of what your school is all about and when interested they can enter and explore

Social Media Integration in Modern School Web Design

This is not something that can be done overnight. First, you have to make sure your website design is aligned with your social media marketing strategy. The next step is to make sure your website design is fast and responsive.

Mobile phone and social media users are very quick on the draw and can bounce off your slow-moving website very quickly. The third step for proper social media integration is to have your website design including social media icons and share buttons.

The fourth step is as important as the first three but maybe slightly more important at the same time. When integrating social media into your modern school website design you still need riveting content to hold their attention.

This content needs to be entertaining as well as shareable or it may not capture the interest of your website’s visitors. Don’t forget to track the performance of your website design.

Staying Current with Social Media in School Web Strategies

This means that you have to stay current with popular trends, be able to see what new trends are developing and know when to switch from older trends to newer ones.

The trends that are being suggested currently are:

– use posts and X to broadcast updates and alerts

– use live streaming for lectures and discussions

– use Instagram for digital storytelling

– and more options

Staying current means watching what social media trend becomes popular and which ones have lost favour with your target audience. Then adapt to the changing landscape.

Also, you should have social media icons on your web pages so your target audience can easily access those accounts and see what you are doing on those platforms.

The reason you use social media outlets like YouTube is that if you are not telling your story, someone else is and the information may not be accurate or flattering to your school.

Some Additional Words

When you are ready to incorporate your school website design with social media accounts, contact our company. This is what we do. Our company is dedicated to upgrading and enhancing school website designs.

We do the hard work for you and can help you create a great social media marketing plan that should reach your target audience. This is not that hard to accomplish when you have our experts working with you to create a great social media marketing strategy.

There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic, and resulting guidance from the Department for Education, has continued to effect the way our schools are able to run now and will do so moving forwards.
When it comes to working with our school customers, we want to help you stay on top of what’s happening in as many ways as possible, so as well as ensuring you have regular contact from our team direct, whether that’s by email or phone call, we’ve also continued to create some great and informative new episodes of the School Jotter Podcast. Here’s an overview of some of the latest episodes, available on Google Podcasts and on Spotify.

New Coronavirus Act 2020

Sean talks with Sharon and Lawrence about the new Coronavirus Act 2020 and about how schools need to ensure education continues.

Parents Evenings

Sean talks to Arthur and Lawrence about how schools can handle parents evenings in the current social climate.

Remote Education in Local Lockdowns

We examine different approaches to remote education during recent local lockdowns. We explore the use of video, learning platforms and the use of off-line work packages.
There are many more episodes of the School Jotter Podcast available, if you’d like to find out more about any of the topics covered or you’d like to suggest a topic yourself, please do contact us.

Supporting wellbeing through meaningful communication during lockdown is important for all schools, and plays a vital role in MAT’s strategies for coping during lockdown. Gov.uk posted a case study on the 5th of may outlining how schools can stay in contact during lockdown. This outlines effective communication strategies that schools are using to maintain contact to support students wellbeing in both primary and secondary academies in trusts (read full article). 
The article highlights how the use of calls and consistent text messages are helping schools to continue to support student wellbeing. This highlights the reliance of some schools on text message systems, which are designed for regular use – and get very expensive when used to message large numbers of students daily. Online messaging systems with unlimited messaging, such as the School Jotter app messages add on, allow the schools to have the freedom to send persistent messages without worrying about high cost message packages.
On top of the cost of texting, privacy issues may arise with increased communication. With teachers and safeguarding staff working at home, making calls to vulnerable students could easily compromise the personal data of staff. To overcome this, School Jotter is adding a calls function to the mobile app, facilitating video or voice calls between staff and students. This is integrated with your schools MIS, so there is no unnecessary data sharing.

Alongside this, the School Jotter Mobile App lets schools share news updates, notices and newsletters through push notifications. This is a great way to share information with parents, getting messages directly to their phones.
Until the end of July, we are offering our online spellings software for free to any school who purchases the School Jotter Mobile app with messaging and calls, and the first 5 orders will gain free access to our internal communications platform, Watch and Learn, which is perfect for inter-school communication in a trust during lockdown.
Get in touch here to find out more

We were excited to interview our newest Marketing Intern, Wiktoria from Keighley’s Holy Family Catholic School. Although she has been with us for a short amount of time, we have had a blast getting to know her!
Wiktoria is an incredibly fast learner and has impressed us with her ability in completing tasks quickly and efficiently. She helped us publish content on our blog and organise an event that some of the biggest companies in Leeds will attend tomorrow. She is also learning how to build school websites with School Jotter.
We got a chance to interview Wiktoria, and are excited to introduce her to our readers!

Tell us something fun about you.
Hi, my name is Wiktoria Plata, I am 14 years old and I come from Poland. I live in Keighley with my younger sister and my parents. I am in Year 10 and go to Holy Family Catholic School.

What do you hope to learn by the end of the internship?

By the end of this internship, I hope to learn how Webanywhere works with and helps schools through education websites and apps.

What is your favourite thing to do outside of school?

Outside of school, I like to meet up with friends and do something interesting.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

In 5 years, I see myself at university studying a degree that will help me get a well-paid and helpful job.

What would be your ideal job?

My ideal job would be to do something that hopefully helps people.

What is your favourite book and why?

My favourite books are written by Michael Morpurgo, because his books are always adventurous and usually have a meaning behind them.

What kind of music do you like and who is your favourite artist and why?

I like listening to pop and sometimes some country music. My favourite artist is Sia because of the way she sings and writes her songs.

Listen to our podcast on Bett Show’s survey of 1,000 teachers.

 

Jotter Blogs enables you to create multiple different blogs. A blog is like a folder or container. Within each blog you can have multiple posts, which are like individual diary entries. You can create as many blogs as you like, and post as many entries as you like.
For example, you might have a blog called Class page and inside that blog add posts about what you’ve done in class. You might have another blog called School events and then post things that have happened at school in there.

As soon as blogging is switched on for students, they will all be able to create their own blogs and posts, which everyone else in the school can see and comment on.
The word blog is the bringing together of two words, web and log. A blog started out as being the work of a single person recording information about themselves or their interests, sort of an online diary. With web 2.0 technologies allowed the blogs readers to post comments and thus start a conversation about a post, making blogging a way to engage with like minded people and interactive, rather than the reader having just a passive role.
Today blogs are used to collaborate, collect information in one place whilst brainstorming and reach out to others that share your interests.
Blogs have now made it into the classroom and have become a useful tool in many ways. Firstly as a communication tool and a way of recording events and more recently as a way to encourage collaboration, engage boys and improve literacy skills. In your blog you can encourage peer support, everyone taking an active role, whether as a teacher or a learner and hopefully both!
Blog posts can be made up of text, images and links to websites and files.

Jotter Mobile just got even better with the release of v1.8, which will roll out across all apps by May 5th.
After lots of market research our developers have created the features you most requested, and we hope you will benefit from this free update.                     
Here are some of the changes you can expect to see:

Custom apps:

• Custom sections in the navigation structure. Each custom link consists of a name, icon and an URL. You can define up to three custom sections.
• Reordering and disabling of sections in the drawer menu and the dashboard tray. These are edited from the Mobile Centre module.

All apps:

• Notification badges on sections within the app. These show that new content has been added but not read by the user.
• New expanding dashboard tray option. This can be configured at the delivery stage or can be added with PCR.

If you would like more information about v1.8 or Jotter Mobile please call 0800 862 0492 or fill out our short contact form.

In 2007 we launched the original School Jotter website system. Since day one we have received praise for how the system makes it easy for teachers to manage their school’s website. In 2012 we released School Jotter 2, which further tailored the system to the needs of our thousands of customers.

Introducing 2.5

Our latest product innovation, School Jotter 2.5, expands on this by pairing our class leading website system with a range of eLearning software, which empowers schools to bridge the gap with parents, governors, and students.

Modules

With School Jotter 2.5, our platform now includes extra modules which ease communication, such as a Surveys module to gain feedback (perhaps for a parental survey) and a Blogs module which headteachers and other staff can use to engage parents with day to day school life.

According to The Joseph Rowntree report, engaging students and parents with a child’s learning is one of the key influencers on student attainment. Using the School Jotter 2.5 eLearning software, such as Jotter ePortfolios, students can showcase their work, and this can be shown to parents, while teachers can give online feedback.

Amazing Value

Our new School Jotter 2.5 offering represents great value, as it saves money compared with buying the equivalent products separately. With unlimited users, storage and training, upgrade to School Jotter 2.5 TODAY and your school can save £500 on the recommended retail price. Please call use for more information.