BEYOND THE LOGO: Baking Your Brand Into Your School Website
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.
TRAP ONE: Nice image, welcome, school news, and the contact details…
TRAP TWO: Nice images, welcome, school news, quick facts, staff profiles, international map, embedded video, interactive food menu, what the head watched on tv last night, and on and on and on….
Hopefully, you can identify the issues with both of these approaches, but if you can’t, here are the headlines.
TRAP ONE: Whilst short and sweet, this doesn’t do much to help you stand out from the crowd, following the same flow that the majority of your competitors will be using!
TRAP TWO: It’s too bloomin’ long! It’s great you want to shout about all the awesome things happening at your school. Still, a homepage with this amount of content will ensure your visitor never gets to the footer. You need to keep your experience condensed, unique and relevant to ensure your visitors are getting the very best out of your homepage experience.
WHAT GOES INTO YOUR SHOP WINDOW?
So, let’s all take a minute to think about how we can break the monotony of the same homepage flow and deliver something authentic to your school and your brand.
First off, bring back your essential brand messages that you have established, write each of them down on a piece of paper with a good bit of room between each one.
Now ask yourself, how can you reflect these brand messages through different types of content on your homepage?
A few examples might be…
A global community of world-changing students - Why not show your very best alumnae on an interactive map, showing what they have achieved and where since leaving your school?
Unrivaled academic results - Instead of just posting a news article about it, why don’t you create a great interactive infographic that animates when the user gets to it?
A thriving boarding experience like no-other - Show an Instagram feed of the boarding houses and takeovers from house masters to show what goes on inside.
See, that wasn’t too hard, and not a head’s welcome in sight ;)
Next, take a look at your messages and prioritise these. If you have five key messages, what happens if you remove the last two and make them easy to navigate? Does this impact the experience, or can you still get your most important messages across your homepage?
Remember, the goal here is not only a genuinely unique homepage that reflects your brand but also something that is just the right length to keep your users scrolling/swiping.
IT’S NOT JUST THE JOB OF CREATIVE GRAPHICS AND AWESOME CONTENT THAT SHOW OFF YOUR BRAND. IT’S THE EXPERIENCE AS WELL.
I know visiting every website delivers an experience (there’s a whole term named after it - UX), but challenge why that experience needs to be just scrolling down (or swiping-up). Can your users’ interactions reflect that of your brand message?
For example, if your message tells a story of growth, could your website scroll from the bottom to top, showing something getting bigger and “growing”?
If your pedagogy is based on exploration and discovery, could your website embrace this approach and turn the experience into something more game-like?
If you pause from the idea of a “normal” website and focus on your brand message instead, it’s amazing the possibilities this opens up for a unique online experience.
TALES FROM BEYOND THE HOMEPAGE
It’s all well and good creating a great homepage, but that’s just the beginning. If your users cannot navigate the site and find the content they are looking for, your website has failed.
Use tools like Google Analytics to see the key pages that users visit and pop them onto post-it notes. Next, take a look at the pages that inspectors say you must have on the website and pop those on some other notes. Now (and most importantly), start to write down the key pages that make your school unique, look back at your brand messages and expand on them to tell the full story of your school.
When you have all of your post-its, then it’s time to categorise them, bunch them into piles that help you to navigate them, and give that pile a name. You might find that you have traditional titles, like “about us” and “admissions,” but that’s fine at this point.
Website structure creation and page naming are a tricky balance of being creative and unique, but not too uncommon to confuse your visitors. They need to get to what they need!
I tend to find a balance of more straightforward main categories, followed by more “on brand” titles strike a nice balance, for example…
Within “About Us,” you might find…
Your journey begins today
An incredible experience
Putting you first
A rich history
By giving more traditional titles, you help your user get in the right “ball-park” and then tease them with the exciting content titles that engage them and make them want to explore.
WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT LOAD SPEED… OR YOU HOPE SO
Now that I have given away some exciting insight into how you can improve your own school’s website, I want to leave you with an important message.
Creating a fantastic website with beautiful visuals, a unique experience, and a super-fast load speed is an incredibly tricky tightrope to walk.
Bear in mind that some of your best ideas may have to be reigned in to benefit your website loading in a suitable amount of time. And if you are going to ask your parents to wait just that little bit longer for your incredible experience (which usually is worth it!), make sure you give them clear clues that something amazing is coming. Start seeding your brand messages even on the loading screen.
Every point of your online experience is another opportunity for you to stand out and tell your story!
If you need any help with baking your brand into your school website, please get in contact!