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I don't have much hair left to tear out, but I am ready to tear it out! I am always adding URLs to Schools Online. It's fun work with one negative side to it: THOSE DUMB WEB SITES WHICH ARE POORLY DESIGNED!!
Joe Landsberger, the talented Web
Master at St. Thomas' University in St. Paul, Minnesota, puts it succinctly:
"90% of commercial websites are poorly designed, and satisfy an executive
committee rather than the website visitor." Check out his matrix on the
subject entitled Basics
of understanding, evaluating, & developing Web Sites. It certainly
applies to private school Web sites!
So, what makes some private school
Web sites better than others?
In my opinion the best private school
Web sites are:
informative
You pull up the splash screen and you know exactly what the school is all about. You don't have to search through several layers of material to find the pertinent facts about the institution.simple
Simple is elegant! Have a school crest? Use it! Mount it on an easy to read background. (Sorry, folks! Green on black just isn't easy to read!) Keep those type faces a reasonable size too. 8 pt is really very small and hard to read!fast-loading
Come on, guys! Spare me the gimmicks! We don't need to have the school song or, worse, a plagiarized popular song - does ASCAP know you are using it? - which takes three minutes to load with the splash screen! Ditto for things which flash at you! Give me a break!accessible from a variety of platforms
Most browsers can support frames. But not every browser will support the very latest HTML tags. Better off avoiding anything which might make your site inaccessible to the poor souls using Internet Explorer 4.0 or earlier. And take care with those Meta Tags. Nobody will find your site if you don't get those right!cohesive
This ties in with #2! Make the site logical. Have some flow and connectivity to the various segments. If the site is confusing, folks will click out of there but fast! Tell the school's story in an orderly manner. Be intuitive when you label the various segments; strangers will find it easier to get around and read your message!
One final word of caution: let the folks in public relations, not the computer department, design the site content and concept. Then let the computer folks execute those ideas! Some of the worst sites I have seen were created by computer geeks who got totally caught up in the means rather than the end!
For a look at safety considerations in school Web site design turn to page 3.
What are your thoughts on this issue? Please take the time to express your views and experiences in the Private Schools Forum. We need to hear from you.
--Rob Kennedy, Private Schools Guide
