We’ve just pushed the latest update to School Jotter live. You might have noticed these are coming more frequently now – we’re aiming for smaller, more frequent, more agile releases every two weeks, rather than a big one every few months.

Site

• A new Files Download element has been added that allows you to share files and folders to your school website.
• Pinterest has been added to the social networks list (compatible bespoke themes only.)
• Extra security has been added to blogs that have been embedded on the website.
• An issue that broke pagination of embedded blogs has been resolved.
• An issue where CSV results were exported incorrectly from Forms has been resolved.
• An issue where images could not be removed from News stories has been resolved.

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Website Design For Schools In The UK

This is a tricky issue for non-experienced website designers. While wanting to save on costs by doing their school web design themselves, schools should make sure they meet the Ofsted requirements when it comes to website content and structure.

One of the problems many school website designers encounter is that they use too many colors making their content very difficult to read. What follows are some tips to help create a beautiful website design for schools in the UK.

Defining Your School’s Brand and Content Strategy

Knowing your school’s brand and what you stand for will help you write the content for your school’s website. You need to understand the school’s core values as well as what your school stands for.

Then you need to understand what your school does well and what problems it can solve for its students. There are other key questions you can ask yourself before you start creating a content strategy.

That strategy will revolve around the answers to all of those key questions. Plus, understanding the purpose of your school will help you create a unique website look that stands out from the crowd.

What also is involved in defining your school’s brand will be the following elements:

• Develop your school’s promise to potential parents and students
• Add a tagline that reflects the purpose of the school
• Create your school’s identity- this includes creating a logo, finding your voice, the imagery you want to use, and the colours you want to use.

Defining your school’s brand is a wide range of elements that help potential and current students know who you are. That makes your website more attractive than using a number of bright or other colours.

Building A Solid User-Friendly Experience On The School Website

In the world of web design, there are a lot of options you can use to build complexity to your school’s website design. However, the old sayings ‘keep it simple’ and ‘less is more’ are key guides you should use when creating a primary school website design.

Yes, having fun things like pop-ups, interactive polls, and lots of videos can help but often those elements and other ones turn the user experience into something far more time-consuming than parents want to go through.

The key to building a good user experience on your school’s website is to follow these key tips:

1. Keep The Website Focused On Current School Parents

Make sure the relevant information is easy to access and find. Those important issues of tuition costs, teacher contact opportunities, and school events all should be very easy for the current school parent to find.

2. Focus On Enrollment

Make your enrollment process a priority. Part of the school’s website design is to attract new students to your school. This can partly be achieved through your About Us web page.

3. Help Busy Parents

This is done by having a clear school calendar on your website. Then make it easy to access for those busy parents who do not have the time to waste doing complicated searches or bypassing pop-ups, etc.

4. Miscellaneous Pages

These include contact information, a news and media web page, and more. You want to keep your school web design interesting without making it hard for parents to navigate through all the pages to get the information they want.

Add Interactive Features and Compelling Content for engaging the audience

Once you have understood your school’s identity and purpose, and then fleshed out a content strategy, now is the time to add some more interesting elements to your school website design.

Look for key features that can incorporate interactive activities. These will help engage both parents and students. Then make sure to have someone write excellent content that will be of interest to those school parents.

Content is still king and will help boost your school’s website in the search engine rankings. Bad content is one way to drive prospective students and parents away from your school.

Some Additional Words

Since 2003, School Jotter has been working with thousands of schools across the UK and worldwide to develop the best school website and e-learning software. We always make sure our school web design reflects the ethos of each school.

Contact us today to see how we can help make your school website design more attractive and user-friendly. Our experts will be glad to spend time working with you to enhance your public face.

We’re pleased to announce that Office 365 integration is now fully up and running for anyone using our School Jotter platform. You can now take advantage of the full range of Office 365 features within the School Jotter ecosystem, complete with single-sign-on and file sharing.
Here’s the best new features of integration:

Single sign-on

And it really is single sign-on – with the Office 365 login method, if you’re logged into Office 365 you won’t need to enter anything to get into School Jotter, your computer will handle it all.

Easily add files to your website

Access your OneDrive files from within Jotter, and insert them as items on your School Jotter website. This means you don’t have to worry about taking an image from OneDrive, downloading it then reuploading it to Jotter – it’s right there already!

Outlook Calendar Synchronisation

It’s likely that your school has everything organised in an Outlook calendar already – wouldn’t it be great if this could automatically pull through to your website? The Calendar app can now read from and update from your Office 365 calendars, saving you one more update task.

All your OneDrive files in School Jotter

With the Office 365 desktop app, you and your students can even have access to your desktop files in School Jotter.

Share and collaborate

As well as accessing your own files, you can even share them with others, making it a great way to enable collaboration amongst students.
Interested in the benefits of integration? Contact us for a free demo.

As of this month, new Ofsted guidelines on school websites have gone into force, but it’s a bit confusing what these actually are. We’ve written this blog post to help demystify the changes a bit, and it should be helpful whether or not you’re a School Jotter user.
The main focus of the new requirements is governor disclosure. Basically, you now have to put information on who your governors are, what they do etc onto your website on a publicly accessible page – previously, this was recommended but not compulsory information. So here’s what you’ll need:

• Name: You’ll need to have the names of your governors – photos can also help, but aren’t compulsory
• Category: What type of governor are they?
• Which body appoints them: Who appointed them to their position as governor
• Their term of office: When will they be serving until? Is it a time-limited or a more permanent position?
• Committees: The names of any gubernatorial committees they serve on
• Their positions of responsibility: For example, if they’re the Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary etc – what position do they hold?
• Voting rights: What things can they vote on and how this will influence the school?

Additionally, in order to make sure that any potential conflicts of interest are laid bare, the following information needs to be disclosed to the public:

• Any relevant business interests: Who they work for – are they part of a company who might benefit from school contracts?
• Details of positions at other schools: Do they govern any other schools? If not, this doesn’t need to be filled in.
• Any relationships at the school: If a governor has a relationship to another governor or member of staff at the school, you’ll need to put it down here. This includes spouses, partners and relatives.

Of course, these are just the new requirements – there’s still plenty of existing ones! Take a look at our Ofsted checklist for more information – you can print it out and tick off the areas you’re compliant in to give you a better idea of how you’re doing. Alternatively, perhaps you’d be interested in a free healthcheck by one of our website consultants – you don’t need to be with School Jotter, we’re here to help you!

One of the most common questions our consultants get asked is “what’s your delivery process like and how long is it going to take?” This is something you should be asking all school website providers really, as it’ll inform how they’re going to be delivering your product. We’ve produced an infographic here to help explain some of what you might expect to experience over the School Jotter delivery cycle.

Click here for a free, no-obligation, no-payment-information-needed trial of School Jotter

One of the hardest tasks for some schools is not just engaging pupils in their learning – but engaging parents in the pupil’s learning, too.
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This is a question we hear many teachers ask – and our team regularly speak to schools wanting help with choosing the right content for their website.

Webanywhere has already created a checklist for schools (which you can find here) but now we can offer you even more help with keeping Ofsted happy – with a number of free events around the country.

Tracey Gentle, a CEOP Ambassador and former teacher, will speak at many of these events, using her knowledge of school websites – and what both you as a school and Ofsted as the inspectorate need to get out of having a website. She will even cover the latest additions to the Ofsted/DfE criteria – as of course the guidelines and requirements are updated all the time.
The full list of free sessions covering Ofsted requirements for school websites is below. If you would like further information, or would like to attend, please email events@webanywhere.co.uk.

Thursday 21st November 9.30am-12.30pm

Wolborough Primary School, Newton Abbott, Devon TQ12 2JU

Friday 22nd November 9.30am-12.30pm

Christ Church CE Primary School, Leigh, Wigan WN7 4HB

Thursday 28th November, 3.15-5.515pm

Westborough School, Westcliff-On-Sea SS0 5BS

Friday 29th November, 9am-12pm

St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Primary School, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 7DG