Your school or college website has the power to engage your audience in a depth not found in any other online media. Using rich media on your school website has huge power! Tweets are so short you can't expect deep engagement. Facebook can be a powerful way of getting your message out but ultimately you're trying to get users back to your website!

That's why using rich media on your school website provides you with one of the biggest opportunities to reach and engage your audience powerfully. In this post we'll give you an intro to the power of rich media. Over the coming weeks we'll chat them through in lots more detail!

Photo Galleries

Every time you publish a News article or an Event or a Blog Post, what can you do to really bring that content to life? Photos are the single most important and easy asset you can use to draw users into your content. You'll need a great leading photo for any page of content, whatever the format. But why not really bring that to life with a great photo gallery.

Of course, the software you use has to make that as easy as possible. The Schudio School Website software has the simplest, most powerful photo gallery tool available in any school website package.

Flip-Books

Have you seen theses? The nice, pretty page-turners? They work great for the lovely, glossy publications like your prospectus. They're not so good for text-heavy documents like policies.

You should have the option to add flip-books with just a couple of clicks and it shouldn't cost you anything to add as many as you like. They should also work on any device and should not use Flash!

Image Editor

One of the most time-consuming, frustrating jobs with managing anything creative is learning a skill on an expensive piece of software just to be able to do some simple image manipulation. A great School Website Software partner will have this covered for you.

The conversations we have with schools and colleges all around the UK is that you don't have the time or budget to buy and learn how to use new software to edit photos and images. That's why we chose to hook in a great online tool, from market leaders Adobe, to put that power in your hands.

If you don't have access to such a tool then search online for 'online image editor'. There are some fantastic free tools available. We just think there's no reason you shouldn't have that as part of your school website software! That way you can truly use rich media on your school website.

Video

The demand for video as part of your website has never been greater. To be frank, it's only going to head in one direction. You should be able to easily add video to your website and it should work perfectly on any device.

There's lots of creative ways to use video right throughout your site and we'll be covering this in more detail in a few weeks. In the meantime, look out for opportunities to grab some decent footage of the brilliant things that go on in the life of your school.

... little mention for podcasting

Schools have a great opportunity to record podcasts and share them through your website. It's really easy to record a short opinion piece or report and share that through your website. That provides and extra medium for your content to be shared and accessed as and when your users decide to.

User Journey

One of the most important parts of any website is it's ease of use. From carefully structured content to key elements that encourage your users to respond how you want them to. Getting your user journey right is so important.

Rich media on your school website plays an important part in this process. Through the use of banners, splash images and other elements you can direct users to exactly where you want them at key points in the year.

Tying it all Together - Keeping it tidy

Finally, it's definitely worth mentioning that it is so important to keep the structure of your website strong. That's not just the main navigational structures, which is very important. It's also the way your media is structured as well. That means making it really easy for you to manage (which the Schudio School Website software is brilliant at doing automatically). It also means using naming conventions and small snippets of information consistently.

Putting some effort into keeping things tidy has some powerful effects.

Firstly, it will make your website much, much easier to manage. Secondly, it will have a direct impact on how easy to navigate your site is for your users. Thirdly, and really importantly, it will have a tangible effect on how your website ranks on search engines.

There are so many important considerations when it comes to the use of rich media on your school website that we couldn't possibly cover it all in one post. Watch out over the next few weeks for our series on The Power of Rich Media on your School Website.