Why should your school have a website?

Why should your school have a website?

A school website is an effective and fast becoming essential way of communicating with your school's wider community, including parents, pupils and prospective pupils.A properly constructed school website is an information system far more powerful than anything else your school can provide to the wider community. A good school website will efficiently structure content, images, communications and an extensive array of multimedia technology that will leave your visitors with a far greater knowledge and insight into your school than any other form of media would have the ability to do.

Most schools may already have an online presence and feel that they have satisfied the requirements of their parents need for online information. However, if your school website was built a few years ago and has not been updated since (most haven’t), are you really supplying the information both current parents and pupils would wish to have access to. Such as when is the next PTA meeting, when is the next recorder practice, what date is half term holiday?

So, if your school website states that your reception class will be enjoying Spanish lessons this term, although the person who did provide the Spanish lessons has not done so for 2 years or so – is that providing a good service to your current crop of parents and students? Your school sits at the centre of the local and wider community and should have an obligation to link to the community and assist it as much as possible.

Ask yourself, or, raise the question at the next PTA meeting – what should be the role of your school website?

To provide up to date and useful information?
To accurately portray the overall spirit of the school?
To bring together the community?
To advise of its mission within the community?
To gain market research and parent and pupil opinion?
To reduce some of your support and customer service costs?
To make a wider audience aware of the schools work?
To find new students?
To conduct e-commerce for school items?
To reduce printing and mailing costs?

Ask yourself, how many of these criteria your school website is currently succeeding in.
A lot of parents these days search for schools online by visiting websites and comparing features, will your school website stand up against the next one down the road if you haven’t detailed any of the valuable improvements you have made over the last few years on your website?

At www.sitechooser.co.uk/School-Websites/ we pride ourselves on providing you with the website your school and its community deserves. Our services are hassle free and surprisingly cost effective. Whether you require a completely new school website or your old site updating, we can assist you and make the whole process completely stress free from start to finish.
All of our school websites and nursery websites are produced by our in-house team of professional website and graphic designers. Over 90% of our work comes through referrals from existing and satisfied clients.

At SiteChooser School Websites we guarantee that our school website code is 100% valid against the very latest industry guidelines. With search engines becoming smarter all the time, there has never been a more important time to have valid website code. A school website with valid website code will invariably perform better with major search engines than a website with code errors. In fact, should a site have too many code errors, search engines will not be able to read the content of a website and it will then not feature in their listings at all.

Should you be thinking of appointing a website designer to produce your new school website, run a few of their portfolio sites through the following free web code checker found at http://validator.w3.org/, if the sites you check return with errors it may be time to give SiteChooser a call.

Why is it so important for your school to be online?

The latest industry reports show that 82% of consumers use search engines first to find information online, that includes searching for information on schools and nurseries.

Visit www.sitechooser.co.uk/School-Websites and ask us for a no obligation chat to discover just how easy it can be to put your school at the very heart of your community.

School and Nursery Websites

We are proud to unveil a revamped section of our website.

http://www.sitechooser.co.uk/School-Websites/ has been created to replace our childcare section.

The area will provide information for childrens nursery, primary school, secondary school, academy, college and university websites, along with a new service providing search engine optimisation in respect of the same.

Feel free to have a look and refer us to any of your friends or colleagues who may work in the education sector.

Search Engine Optimisation

How can companies know if they are getting value for money from their SEO?

It is astonishing some of the high rates that are being quoted to small businesses, sometimes, many thousands of pounds without any guarantee for success.

Without question, some people are being taken advantage of due to their own lack of knowledge within the SEO field. As time moves on, companies of all shapes and sizes will become more informed and more aware of what is fast becoming a vital service. Competition will increase enormously and consequently, more reasonable rates will be offered to those that are seeking an affordable route to advertising their company website.

Some of our smaller clients often get suckered in to paying ridiculous prices for advertising in online business directories, even though most of them are worthless schemes that are dramatically overpriced. Yet another example on how the uninformed are being taken advantage of. A huge amount of our customers remain wary of using SEO services to work on their own website, yet they will hand their money over to A N Other business directory without any guarantee of success because they’ve been drawn in by the sales spiel.

It becomes increasingly infuriating when clients, who wanted to spend as little as possible on their web design, call back and complain that the website that we designed for them is not generating the new business they had been expecting. These are the very same people who were not interested in having any SEO carried out on their new website but have since handed over hundreds of pounds to highly polished salesmen from Business Directories.

In conclusion, the only way that the average person is going to understand the importance of SEO services is to actually talk through what is available with their website designers. After having been referred to us by a trusted source, having received the website you wanted at the price you wanted, having been shown that the code within the site is without error, having seen your new site get listed with the major search engines – WHY OH WHY do you then go and give your hard earned money to a business directory and not talk to your web designer.

SiteChooser are happy to provide SEO services only based upon success – YES we do provide a guarantee.

Visit us at www.sitechooser.co.uk to get in touch and find out how you can get true value for money on SEO services.

Rescue Your Website

We got just a little bit too fed up with incorrect web code, so we're attempting to do something about it.

We've just launched www.rescueyourwebsite.co.uk, here you can buy a simple little report that will identify all of the code errors on your site, simply pass the report on to your web designer and say 'Fix that lot buster or you'll get a punch up the trumpet'.

If they won't or can't, go to www.sitechooser.co.uk and ask us to do it for you.

We'd be only too delighted.

Let it stop, let it stop, let it stop

Waking wearily ready for a second day back in the office, my wife tells me it's been snowing again. Another thick layer of snow greets me from my bedroom window and I know it's another day that I will be working from home.

The kids are off school again and even they're seeing it as a bit of white prison now, we're not used to it, we don't like it and to be honest, we're sick of seeing it.

I will endeavour, along with my colleagues, to work from our kitchens and dining rooms to continue to improve the services offered at www.sitechooser.co.uk , the old blitz spirit will kick in with CMS and childcare sites being produced by the barrowload.

I'm sure we'll look back at the photo's of the snowmen built and sledging downhill with much fondness in sunnier times, but for now, I just want to go to work.

School Websites

In this time of snow, ice, traffic chaos and school closures, I have discovered (in the main) just how dreadful school websites are for the local community.

I have investigated most of the schools that are local to me and they all have massive shortcomings. Websites that are dreadfully out of date, dozens of broken links, big sections that are unfinished, nigh on impossible to navigate and virtually all of them designed by someone who works for the school in some capacity.

Surely our teachers time would be better spent doing what they do best, I'm sure most schools have a budget with which to service their website needs, give it to an experienced web designer who for a small fee will give your school something to be proud of and might just make the local community look at it.

My own childrens website was updated to say when the school was closed due to the snow but the rest of the website is mostly unfinished at best, it's been this way for about 6 months.

So a message to headteachers up and down the land, pay someone to do the school website for you and stop worrying about when you'll get time to finish yourself. A correctly assembled website will be more search engine friendly, be of more use to parents and pupils and most importantly - yes you will be able to update it yourself with important messages such as 'school shut yet again due to snow'.

www.sitechooser.co.uk/School-Websites will be updated over the next few days to make it blindingly obvious to headteachers everywhere just how they should spend some of that IT budget for the good of the school and the local community.

New Year Resolution

With the New Year and about 6 inches of snow upon us, a friend of mine imparted upon me some words of wisdom. His New Year Resolution "Do at least a little bit of marketing every day".

Something so simple but so overlooked. We often find ourselves victim of the lack of phone ringing or email enquiries drying up, then the penny drops as per usual that we have to get our fingers out and fight for the little bit of custom that's still out there.

All of us at www.sitechooser.co.uk will be trying to copy my friends New Year resolution as best we can for 2010.

Right, I'm off to do my bit for our marketing strategy.

What's that? Snowball fight, I'll just grab my hat.