Your content is what drives your school website engagement. If your website is dormant and rarely updated you the number of people visiting the site will be low. We understand time at school is short so we want to help you to make minor changes to your website strategy to improve your school website engagement.
1) Consistent Content
Increasing engagement starts with consistency in adding new content. People are more likely to visit your site if they know there will be something exciting for them to view. If after a couple of visits your website visitors find there is nothing more than your statutory content and a few pictures that never change they will quickly decide not to bother visiting your site. Set the tone for your website now! Your site will be checked by your future parents so its the best time to get into good website habits.
Here are some 15-minute tasks. Why not choose 1 to do each day until the end of the academic year?
- Write a News Article - start small! Publish 1 news article a week celebrating all the great things that have happened in school that week!
- Post a Blog - you could start with a specific blog eg Headteachers blog, Gardening Club blog
- Publish events for the coming term
- Uploading recent images into a gallery
- Update your banner images
- Send a push notification through the Schudio app
- Update your box menu images
- Restructure your menu - a full restructure will take some time but consider taking it a menu item at a time
2) Use Social Media
Many schools are embracing social media as a way to communicate and engage with their audience. Social media is a powerful tool which does not have to compete with your school website. Social Media can be used to promote school website engagement.
I often speak to schools who choose between sharing news on social media or on the website. Time is too short to be adding content twice. Thankfully it doesn't have to be one or the other. News articles, events or blog posts can be shared to your Facebook or Twitter page with the click of a button.
This means you can write the content once, without restrictions on the number of characters or images posted, and share it across multiple platforms.
If you share your content to social media in this way it will point people back to your website. People quickly form new habits and will go straight to your site, without having to be pushed from social media.
3) Embrace Blog Comments
Over the past year, we have seen the number of schools embracing comments on their blogs shoot up. And why not? They are very SAFE! If a visitor posts a comment on your blog, the blog author must approve (or reject) the comment before it is published to the site.
Therefore no-one can publish comments to your site without being approved first. So you have far more control over blogs with comments than you do over social media accounts.
If you are not a Schudio client then check that this is the case with your blog facility before you enable your comments.
We see schools use blog comments in creative ways. Some schools set extracurricular tasks for children which they respond to in the comments section. This is a great way to demonstrate to your community how excited your children are by what they are learning in class. But it also allows you to introduce good online safety habits with the children at your school.
Numbers don't lie
If you are wondering whether or not it is worth spending the extra 15 minutes a day updating the dynamic and interesting parts of your school website then why not test it out for a month? All Schudio website clients have analytics tracking set up on their websites. Therefore they can see exactly how many people access their site, when and what they are looking at. Its really valuable information! I guarantee if you spend 15 minutes a day adding content to your site you will see your number of site visitors and your school website engagement increase.
Now is the perfect time to start preparing your website for the new academic year. At Schudio our unique school website software it makes it incredibly easy for you to keep on top of all your school website content. Get in touch to book a walkthrough and request a quote.
