You wouldn’t want to hire an electrician to fix a leaky pipe or a graphic designer to write a book. You want someone who specializes in the area in which you need help! Why should it be any different for your school’s website design?
Many school websites have similar appearances, which can be confusing for prospective families who might be browsing and researching multiple sites. As the first landing place for most people, you want your school website to have that wow factor, accurately tell your school’s story, and provide quick and important information.
Here’s how a Digistorm school website can give your private school a competitive edge over other website providers.
Custom Website Design
If you look at a handful of websites for schools, chances are, you’ll see some similarities in how they’re laid out. While the colors and fonts may have been swapped, it’s easy to spot when someone has used the same school website theme.
Many school website providers are now working with both public and private schools, meaning the existing templates are being exhausted in all sectors. As the school sector gets more competitive, it’s increasingly difficult to stand out from even the public school down the road, who is now selling and pushing their programs more than before.
Digistorm caters specifically to private and independent K-12 schools, helping to highlight your school’s unique story and increase interactions. Rather than fit into a set template, you can customize every aspect of your school website to stand out from competitor schools.
“When we started looking at Digistorm, we were blown away by the interactions, the storytelling pieces, and all the functionality,” says Ashley Conde, Associate Director of Communications at Montclair Kimberley Academy. “We were getting excited about how we can market our school in those fun and unique ways instead of a set template that we’re seeing everyone else use.”
User-Friendly Interface
A good website design for schools should be intuitive and simple to navigate, but that’s not always the case. For many parents and faculty, navigating a website can lead to more clicks and exhaustion than is necessary.
A Digistorm website aims to quickly present information so prospective or existing families can easily access answers and important info. Digistorm’s websites integrate with the school’s student information system and automatically update utilizing a live API connection. Our websites are functional and eye-catching on all platforms, from desktop to mobile to tablet. Plus, highly intuitive designs make navigation easy for anyone visiting the website.
Marketing Made Easy
Your website is singlehandedly your school’s most important piece of marketing. So you want to make sure it’s perfect when you click publish! Through Digistorm, our goal is to build unique websites for schools that grab people’s attention. The homepage must truly represent your school. Who is your audience, and what do they want to see the most when they first visit your website? A good homepage should encourage an emotive connection and keep prospective families engaged. Then, they should be able to find the information that’s most important to them.
It’s also essential that you serve all members of your audience, including alumni, donors, and potential employees. Private schools have many more potential audiences than public schools, and you want to ensure you’re catering to each audience member. This can be hard to do when you’re trying to fit into a set template.
Digistorm also makes it easy to manage your website’s SEO in its content management system. You can optimize your content directly in the system, making your website discoverable to families searching for the right school.
Quick Updates
For many faculty and staff, a website can become a daunting hurdle. The more they struggle using it, the less likely your school’s website will remain up to date with information. Imagine if your school’s staff could quickly log on, upload the information they need, hit submit, and then instantly update the website! No more waiting on the phone with your website provider.
In addition to being visually appealing and easy to navigate, Digistorm websites are also intuitive on the backend, utilizing the Craft content management system. We provide all the training you need to use the CMS system, but anyone who has worked with a similar function will adjust quickly. Users can be assigned their own profile and have controlled access to the website. For example, a member of the athletics team can quickly go in and update the team’s practice schedule but won’t have access to other pages of the website they don’t need to touch. You can easily adjust your sitemap, create approval workflows, manage assets like photos or videos, and change small details like font color or size all on your own without needing any code.
Specialized Features
There are many aspects to school website design that a private school must consider compared to a public school — whole departments in fact! Utilizing a one-system-fits-all website means you might not get the right customizations, and the information may focus on less desirable aspects.
Public schools don’t have to worry about things like admissions, alumni, development, tuition payments, and attracting donors, but these are all vital to the livelihood of private and independent institutions. A private school wants to not only engage and attract prospective families but drive them to the admissions process and help them navigate it with ease. Website integrations with inquiry forms, admissions portals, event registrations, and tuition deposits are a huge bonus for private schools. Digistorm offers these features and more, with flexible pricing that fits into any school budget.
Expert Care
It’s essential to align with your website provider to ensure your school’s needs are properly being met. Digistorm caters specifically to private schools, allowing us to focus on creating and implementing features and services that will benefit your school specifically — not just any old school in the neighborhood.
As part of the Veracross 360 suite of solutions, Digistorm integrates seamlessly with Veracross’s student information system through a live API connection. So, you can say goodbye to overnight syncs and manually uploading files. Anything you update in Veracross will appear on the website immediately, as needed. This allows parents to easily access staff directories, prospective families to view open house schedules, alumni to see the events calendar, and students to access their latest report cards all in one place. Better yet, your staff only has to update information once!
If you’re looking to transform how your school connects with its community, get in touch with our Digistorm team to talk about getting your own private school website.
