How to plan a useful school website

Start with the jobs the website needs to do

Write down ten things a visitor should be able to achieve. For a primary school, these might include checking term dates, reporting an absence, finding admission information, understanding school meals and contacting the office. For a secondary school, add curriculum choices, exam information and careers provision. These are more useful starting points than a list of visual features.

Interview the people who answer repeated questions. Ask the office for common calls, the inclusion team for information families struggle to find, and several parents for tasks they attempted on a phone. Use anonymised examples; the planning document does not need pupil records. Government content design guidance similarly starts from what people need to find or do, rather than an organisation's preferred structure.

Give the project a clear boundary

Separate public information from transactional services and private records. A website may explain how to pay for a trip without holding card data itself. It may introduce a reporting system without exposing attendance information. Decide which service owns each task and what happens if that service is unavailable.

Produce a short scope with three columns: essential for launch, useful after launch, and outside this project. Put a working contact page, accurate information and usable navigation ahead of features that require continual editorial effort. A news section that nobody can maintain should not become the centre of the homepage.

Inventory the material you already have

Create a spreadsheet of current pages and documents, including older files with incoming links. Record the address, title, owner, intended audience, last verified date and proposed action. Actions might be keep, rewrite, combine, archive or replace. Distinguish a file's upload date from the date its contents were checked.

For each essential page, name someone who can approve the facts. The website editor can improve wording and layout but may not know whether a charging policy is current or a curriculum description has been agreed. A replacement website is a good opportunity to resolve those ownership gaps.

Use the content audit guide to turn this inventory into a manageable work list.

Build a practical brief

A useful brief explains the problem, the people affected and the evidence that the result works. Include:

• The main audiences and their most frequent tasks.
• A proposed page structure and a content owner for each section.
• Mobile, keyboard and document accessibility expectations.
• Publishing permissions, approval steps and account recovery arrangements.
• The old addresses that need suitable replacement destinations.
• Hosting, domain ownership, backups and support responsibilities.
• A clear way to export content and leave the arrangement later.

Avoid accepting a demonstration alone as evidence. Ask how staff would publish a closure notice during an incident, replace a policy while preserving its address and remove an account when a colleague leaves.

Design one complete journey

Take a realistic example: a parent needs to arrange school meals for a child starting next term. The journey may involve eligibility information, a menu, dietary questions and a separate ordering service. The public page should explain each step, identify the responsible contact and give the parent a way forward if they cannot complete it online.

Test the whole journey on a small phone. Check whether labels still make sense without images, whether the next action is obvious and whether a document is readable without repeated zooming. A beautiful homepage cannot compensate for a confusing final step.

Agree acceptance before the build

Write observable checks rather than subjective instructions such as "make it modern". A parent should be able to find term dates from the main menu. The office should be able to publish an urgent notice without technical assistance. Every required page should have an owner and a review date. Important old links should reach their replacement without a chain of redirects.

Include website navigation, accessibility and security in acceptance. Identify which failures block launch and who can approve a minor issue for later correction.

Plan the first term after launch

Reserve time for staff training and corrections. Keep a short issue log with an owner, priority and expected resolution date. Review repeated office enquiries to see whether common tasks have become easier, rather than judging success only by visitor totals.

At the end of the first term, remove unnecessary duplication and adjust navigation using what visitors actually need. The website plan should leave the school with a maintainable service, an understood set of responsibilities and a reliable route for families to get information.