YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD REFLECT YOUR BRAND…
You know this, right? Of course, you do!
Then why does your website look like everyone else’s? Where is your brand message that jumps off the screen confidently showing why you are different and better than the rest?
If you start just by looking at a school website homepage, it’s surprising how many of you fall into one of two user flow traps.
It’s that time of the year again - admissions season!
Many schools over complicate their admissions process. Landing pages are a huge part of this. Parents see multiple open day admissions pages, so how will yours stand out from the crowd?
Can you believe it’s been almost 4 years since our original blog on teens using social media! How times have changed.
We asked a real life teenager how they use social in their personal and school life, the results are surprising! Below, we break down the verdict on the platforms of our 2016 blog, platform by platform.
After the infamous Facebook scandal regarding the privacy of its users’ information, Facebook’s user base has dramatically declined. The platform has become far less relevant for teens as the years have gone by, mainly because the population of older adults and embarrassing family members has increased as they’ve discovered social media and tried to become ‘hip’ and trendy. For this reason, in 2020 teens tend to avoid it, and in some cases scorn the older population using it, with jokes being made about ‘Facebook mums’ and their love of cringey minion memes. Many teens have either deleted or abandoned their accounts and prefer other platforms, usually where anonymity is found and a younger audience is prevalent.
The concept of vloggers and influencers has remained, and in some cases grown. Being a YouTuber has become even more prominent as a career path and is a job many teens might aspire to do out of admiration for the fame and glamour it seems to hold. In recent years, YouTube has been updated to include features such as stories, the ability to post images and text, premieres for videos to induce hype, YouTube live streaming and even the option to purchase premium and be able to access many additional features. YouTube in terms of video entertainment is definitely in conflict with Netflix which has become a staple in most teen’s lives, however for me the beauty of YouTube is the variety of content, from informative videos and tutorials to TV clips and sometimes full episodes you can watch for free - something you don’t get with Netflix.
Twitter has still not been crowned the most popular social media site, but has become more politically charged. Politicians now Tweet regularly to share their viewpoints and gain broader support, and controversial personalities share their perspectives on things, often causing uproar. Twitter is a brilliant platform for teens to access these political debates and understand politics in a way more geared towards them. Notably, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg is someone who speaks to her fellow teens on a similar level and has come into conflict with other Twitter users in recent years due to opposing views on climate change. The site is brilliant for teens interested in becoming politically informed and watching debates unfold.
Twitter also has content relevant to teen life outside of politics, especially its place in the world as the origin of meme formats. Exam tweets and memes following GCSE, AS and A-Level papers are incredibly popular, especially due to the support of hashtags by the site. After my GCSE exams, the first thing I’d do was get home and laugh at the tweets and memes people were uploading every few seconds which were relevant to the paper I had sat. It offers a way for teenagers all over the country to connect. I, for one, felt much better about my biology exam after someone admitted in a tweet to writing about children photosynthesising in their paper.
I'll bet you never thought you would need to understand dense and complex federal law working at a school. Well, here we are! Web accessibility is the law and it applies to your school.
It’s not as overwhelming as it seems!
What follows is a simple introduction and a check-list of steps to make your site accessible.
Let’s begin with the question you’re likely asking: What is website accessibility anyway?
The answer is simple. Federal law requires that people with disabilities be able to access your website. That means they must be able to navigate the site with ease, access its content, and engage with all its elements.
Cinemagraphs are a fun and exciting way to add a little bit of gravitas to your content. Captivating and inspirational to your audience, they provide a different dynamic; a new way to look at art and an interactive, visual form to work with. A cinemagraph is a living image - a still photograph that contains an element of movement looped seamlessly to create a never ending moment. It is a mixture of both photo and video and creates something magical by tricking the mind into thinking it’s seeing something truly different.
In short, they can breathe life (or bubbles) into a piece of content to give it that real WOW factor.
We love awards season at @intSchools! This year, we wanted to join in the fun and give you, our loving community, an opportunity to play along too. It's time for the #intSchoolsWebsiteAwards.
Take a look through some of our creative ‘story-led’ websites below, and vote for your favourite!
At @intSchools we promote one core ideal for you to integrate into your school's marketing: ✨STAND OUT✨. We see, day-in and day-out, so many of the key marketing tools employed by schools failing to live up to this simple mantra. Chief among these are the school website.
Now imagine you are a parent, looking for something that really speaks to them - the place they want to send their child to gain an education. If your site looks like any of the above the likelihood is they will skim right past it.
Let's focus on one change that really can make a huge difference when employed properly. Yep, you guessed it: the Head's Welcome.
This is often one of the first pages that new visitors to your site will visit - or are directed to. So when we saw this article from TES we were shocked to see that so often what should be a really good, engaging Head's Welcome is lost in a world of 'same'.
This just will not do! It is so important to ensure that it is as good as it possibly can be - it should reflect the school's brand as well as the personality of the Head. In fact, we would say that of all the pages on your school's website this is the one that you can inflect real human-to-human engagement.
Take a look at your Head's Welcome page. Notice the language used. Now tick off each word from the image below. How many are in there? 1? 2? 5? All of them? It's no surprise - this is the type of language that has been synonymous with schools for a long time. Let's be fair, every school is keen to highlight that they have high standards of excellence; that they achieve outstanding results; and are the best at what they do. School's are always proud of their pupils, who leave with strong and confident personalities; and school's are, of course, rich in learning; an exciting place to study; and a safe haven to develop in.