When you visit your school's website, what are you most likely to be looking for?

[whathaveitakenon]

I've rather rashly volunteered to rebuild my dc's school's website because it's been driving me demented for years, and I'm a professional web designer.

I want to make sure that it is USEFUL as well as attractive and I know that the school admins get a lot of phone calls every day that could be dealt with on the website just as fast (INSET days, lunch menu that day etc).

I'm going to have bloody great big buttons up near the top for Parent Pay, school dinners, and calendar.

But what else? What quick questions do you need answered by your dc's school's website?

If your school has an amazing website, could you share the link?

I hope this doesn't violate any Mumsnet rules about product research, because it's a volunteer thing, not a paid thing. I've been here for a billion years. Balonz, Gluezilla, CF Mexican house etc.

I'm not going to be pouring months of custom work into it or anything - I'm giving it just under a week - but so far it's looking good and I'm looking forward to showing it to the school after half term.

I ran a primary school website for yonks and had Google Analytics running on it. It was hiding in the footer on each page.

The page with the most traffic by a huge margin was the term dates one. This was followed by the general events calendar.

The school is popular and over-subscribed, so the catchment map and the links to the county applications info were popular, too.

It was a big effort on my part to put up kids' work and photos of stuff going on around school, but to my surprise and some disappointment these pages were fairly low traffic.

My top tip: make sure your school file of photography and website permissions is bang up to date and get a sensible/senior person to double-check all photos for that one child who must not appear.

I'm abroad so some stuff will be different, but in case it's helpful:

I only go to the school website to check term dates or find the phone number (and then remember it's saved in my phone).

We can also report absence via the website, which is really handy. But absence policy + phone number to call (with extension if necessary) would be useful too.

DS1 about to go up to secondary so was using school websites for research too, and yes age ranges/year groups helpful. Because it's only obvious if you know the system well. And while most people will there will always be newcomers.

Gallery would be nice to show family/friends who aren't local. And gain an idea of school outside of open days etc.

Usually term dates and dates of events eg school concert, exam week, school trips.

Quite a few times I’ve looked up subject info (exam boards of gcse subjects etc).

School day and timetable info is on a separate log in called My Child at School.

Dates, term dates plus the dates for sports day, assemblies, school trips, swimming lessons and so on. Ours also has a tab where you can see all the emails sent out to parents, sorted by year group when appropriate. I find this very useful to double check things, it’s quicker than hunting for the email in my inbox.

The phone number because I don't need it often enough to remember it because I'm working there. And the contact emails that parents are given for each department, so I know where they could have sent their important email that should have been sent to me and they're insisting I have ignored.

Term dates because I lose track of what day it is and how long until the next day off

What week it is if they have a two week timetable see above

Special events - in advance, please. I hate only finding out with 24 hours notice that I'm supposed to be doing x, y and z when they realistically take 3 days to sort out

Uniform/equipment policy because I'm fed up with parents claiming they had no idea that eight inch platforms and a skirt adjusted to arse cheek level isn't appropriate uniform.

The link for the staff area so I can check my emails.

ParentPay/Go4Schools/Twitter/Facebook

The latest newsletters/trip letters/etc because nobody ever tells us anything

The vacancies. On other school's websites

Oh, and I HATE staff lists - especially if the individual names are searchable. Shoving my name up enabled a really creepy ex to find me within three days of it going live - I had no idea my details had been added until they mentioned there had been a man hanging around the car park after dark who said he was waiting for somebody.

Nobody needs to contact me by name. Even my email there (set up specifically by IT because of this - the staff list was the then Head's insistence with a new IT guy) is job specific, not my name.

Any information involving attendance by parents could be easier to find. But as pps have pointed out, it's vital that statutory information and policies are updated on a regular basis. It doesn't sound as if anyone's been on top of this for a while, so do make sure they're not assuming you'll be overseeing this from now on.

Start and finish times, including nursery class times.

I'm sure if you're a professional you're bearing it in mind, but ease of use for admin staff etc so you don't end up with 3 year out of date term dates again :-)

I'm usually looking for copies of letters that DD hasn't been given or has lost, or ones that the school should have emailed, but haven't. Huge secondary school, hopelessly disorganised and go out of their way not to have contact with parents 😠

I go into a lot of different schools for work and I’m always looking for the break and lunch times. Some schools make this super easy to find, others don’t have it at all. It’s maybe not vitally important but it’s really handy and saves me tracking down staff to ask.

I'm a school admin and the main lead for the website. YY to the statutory stuff. If only SLT would send it to me...

Our top pages in order for the past year are:
Term dates
Staff (to check spellings for complaints letters or maybe christmas cards - this was actually a surprise to me, I'm going to have to look at making it better as it's a bit rubbish at the moment)
Contact us
Vacancies
Calander (I've set up a fancy google calendar so parents can import it into their own calendar)
Recent News (This is our "blog" and mainly features the newsletters or important announcements)

Admissions is on our front page too as it's quite popular during the autumn term.

I've recently figured out the SEO stuff so our google search now says "Wombat academy is an outstanding school in the beautiful borough of Wombatville, where pupil wellbeing is a priority and academic standards are high." like all the local private schools, instead of a random paragraph from the attendance policy.

I've sent you a PM, op.

Recent letters, term dates, Inset days, the cost of this term’s school lunches.

One thing that annoys me about the school website for the school I work at isn't the design - it's the frequency with which it's updated - e.g. letters home to parents section hasn't been updated in about 2 years . Might be worth making sure there's someone who knows what they're doing available to update it once you've done the donkey work of building the thing!

Lunch menu for the week
Any after school events (eg parents evenings ) so I can guess if I’ll have trouble parking when I go to collect my children from after school sports and need to leave earlier
Contact details of teachers (we are encouraged to email them)

Term dates
Everything up to date
Teacher photos

I don't care about lunch menu.

I was chatting to a parent yesterday and despite newsletters being emailed home every week she seemed totally unaware of how anything in the school operated. Some people just don't retain info or bother to take it on board.

Always info on sports day/free dress etc. One thing I used to hate was when it said “holidays begin XX June”. I never knew if they were in or off that day. Now they say “School closes for Summer holidays at 3:20pm on XX June”, so no confusion!

Thank you again HUGELY for all of this. It's really useful to have this kind of information, and I promise that if you ever change schools and come to ours, you will be thrilled with the website.

Or if your school website suddenly changes dramatically for the better in about two weeks from know, you'll know who started this thread.

For me it’s usually:

Term dates/inset days

Email address/contact info for a particular teacher. Or telephone number.

Pay for school meals.

Upcoming events - trips or etc.

Anything else, I don’t even bother reading it.