Website design for schools and educational institutes
A school website has two jobs that barely overlap. For a few months it has to win over families choosing a school, and for the rest of the year it is where enrolled parents check what is happening this week.
One school year
Homepage leads with
Admissions open
Fee structure
Book a visit
Homepage leads with
Circulars
Calendar
Fee dates
Admission season is a spike, not a trend
School website design in India has to plan for a calendar few other organisations face. Enquiries from new families pile into the months before an academic year begins and then almost stop, so a homepage designed for an average month is wrong in both halves of the year.
The answer is an admissions mode. While applications are open, the front page leads with the dates, the age criteria for each entry class, the fee structure, the application form and a way to book a campus visit. Once admissions close, all of that moves into its own section and the front page is handed back to the families already enrolled. The switch is designed in from the start, so it is a routine change each year rather than a redesign.
Colleges and junior colleges follow the same pattern with different dates, and usually publish merit lists in rounds. Their admissions section is built around those rounds and lists rather than a single closing date.
The parent decides, the child attends
Nearly every word on a school site is read by a parent, and parents read for particular things: how their child travels to school and back, who will teach them, how the school does in board examinations, what the classrooms and grounds really look like, and what all of it costs. The copy answers those in roughly that order of worry.
It also leaves out the vocabulary schools are prone to. World-class, holistic and nurturing future leaders appear on so many school websites that parents have stopped reading them. One fact a parent can verify outweighs a paragraph of adjectives.
World-class infrastructure
Photographs of the labs, the library and the playground, taken on an ordinary school day.
Experienced, caring faculty
Each teacher's subject and qualifications, and how many students share a class.
Excellent results
Board results for the last three years, updated every year, the ordinary ones included.
The part of the site used every week
Once a child is enrolled, the website turns into a noticeboard. Circulars, the term calendar, holiday announcements, exam timetables, fee due dates and changes to bus routes bring enrolled parents back far more often than prospective families ever visit. On most school sites this is an afterthought: a page of scanned letters in whatever order they were uploaded.
We give it a proper home. Each notice carries its date and is filed by class and term. Circulars are published as text that reads on a phone, not as photographs of a printed letter, and the school calendar can be added to a parent's own phone calendar. When the school sends a WhatsApp message, it links to the notice on the site, so the record outlives the chat.
Publish the fee structure
Many schools keep fees off the website and reveal them at the admissions desk. What follows is a stream of phone calls asking the same question, and campus visits from families who were never going to accept the figure. Publishing the fees filters out both before anyone at the school spends time on them.
The structure is what parents need, not a headline number. That means the tuition fee for each class, whether it is charged yearly or by term, the one-time charges at admission, the optional items such as transport and meals, and the refund rules if a child leaves partway through the year.
For CBSE schools, much of this is already required
CBSE asks affiliated schools to publish a mandatory public disclosure on their own website, covering affiliation documents, the fee structure, the academic calendar, results, staff and infrastructure. Built as a readable page instead of a buried PDF, it stops being a compliance chore and becomes something parents use.
Built for a board that signs off in stages
A school website is seldom approved by one person. It passes from the principal to a management committee to a trust or board that meets on its own timetable, and each round can reopen a decision made in the last. So the work is staged to match.
- 1
Structure first. The list of pages and what each is for, agreed before any copy is written.
- 2
Words next. Section by section, in a shared document the committee can comment on directly.
- 3
Design once the words settle. Shown on a preview link that trustees can open on their phones.
- 4
One voice for feedback. A named person at the school gathers every comment into a single reply, so the site is not redrafted for whoever spoke last.
The timetable is worked backwards from the day admissions open, leaving room for each meeting along the way. A new site that launches in the middle of the rush has arrived too late for that year.
In our portfolio
Films for BMC schools
Our work for BMC schools is not a website. It is five short animated films for municipal school classrooms in Mumbai, one each on knowing yourself, choosing food, being healthy, reading what is in your food, and culture. The series was a partnership with the Foundation for Mother and Child Health, backed by Australian Aid.
What carries across is the discipline of explaining something to children without talking down to them. Each film was drawn to stay legible on a classroom projector and to leave a class with one clear lesson. A school website can use film the same way, for a campus tour or a welcome from the principal, and that is work we take on as video production. The full series is in the BMC films case study, and our other projects cover websites, film campaigns and branding.
Questions schools ask
Count back from the day admissions open. Leave time for each round of review by your committee or trust, and aim to have the new site live and checked before the first enquiries of the season arrive, not while they are arriving.
Usually not. One site keeps the school's name and reputation in one place, and each branch gets its own section for the details that genuinely differ: address, age criteria, fees, bus routes and the admissions contact.
Yes, with written permission from their parents, which is simplest to collect on the admission form each year. Group photographs work better than portraits, and a student's full name should never appear beside their face.
Tell us about your school
Your board, your classes, how many branches, and when your next admissions open. We reply with how the site should be organised for both parts of your year, and what your office would need to give us to fill it.
You can also reach us from our contact page.