Most school websites are built for the school, not for the people who use them. Parents visit with a specific question: Is there school today? When is the next event? What is due? Here is how to plan a school site around those questions.
Start with the top tasks
Ask a few parents, students and front-office staff what they look for most. The answers are usually the same:
- Calendar and upcoming events
- Closures, delays and urgent announcements
- Lunch menus and bell schedules
- Contact information and staff directory
- Forms (enrollment, permission slips, volunteer sign-ups)
- Teacher or class pages with assignments
Put those on the homepage, and push the mission statement and history to the About page.
A homepage that answers questions
- An alert bar at the very top for closures and urgent news, easy for office staff to turn on and off.
- Upcoming events pulled automatically from the calendar.
- Quick links to the top tasks above.
- Recent news for celebrations and updates.
Design for the phone first
Most parents check the school site from a phone, often in a hurry: in the pickup line, at work, on a morning when the weather is bad. Test every top task on a phone. If the calendar needs pinching and zooming, or the lunch menu is a PDF that has to be downloaded, it is not finished.
Plan for the day everyone visits at once
A closure or an emergency sends every family to the site in the same ten minutes. Two things have to hold up:
- The process. Decide ahead of time who posts the alert, who their backup is, and where it appears. Practice it once a term.
- The hosting. The site has to stay up under that spike. Page caching and hosting sized for the busy day, not the average day, are what keep it online.
Post the same message everywhere at once: the site’s alert bar, email, text and social. Parents should not have to guess which one is current.
Let staff update it
A site only stays current if the people with the information can update it. WordPress lets you give teachers and office staff their own logins with limited permissions: an Editor can manage news and pages, while a Contributor can draft posts for approval. Build reusable layouts (patterns) so new pages look right without design work.
Calendars and forms
A calendar plugin like The Events Calendar, or an embedded shared Google Calendar, keeps events in one place. Replace PDF forms with online forms (we use Gravity Forms) that email the right person and store submissions, with payment fields for fees when needed.
Accessibility is required
Public schools in the US must meet web accessibility rules, and every school should. That means real text instead of images of flyers, alt text on photos, good color contrast, captions on videos, and forms that work with a keyboard. Build this in from the start; fixing it later costs more.
Stop posting flyers as PDFs and images
A flyer saved as an image cannot be read by a screen reader, searched, translated or read comfortably on a phone. Put the details on the page as text: what, when, where, who to contact. Attach the flyer as an extra if people want to print it.
The standard to build to
In the US, a 2024 federal rule under the Americans with Disabilities Act names WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for public school websites, with deadlines that depend on the size of the district. Private schools should build to the same standard. It is the clearest target there is, and it makes the site better for every parent.
Families who read another language
If a meaningful share of your families speak another language at home, plan for it. An automatic translation widget is better than nothing for general pages. For anything that matters, such as enrollment, safety notices and forms, have a person translate it and publish it as a real page.
Student photos and names
Decide the rules before the first photo goes up, and follow your district’s policy on student images and names. A simple approach many schools use: no full names next to photos, a photo permission question on the enrollment form, and one person who checks before anything with students in it is published.
Many schools, one platform
Districts can use WordPress Multisite to run each school as its own site with a shared design and a single place to manage updates and users.
Decide who owns each part
School sites go stale when nobody is responsible for a section. Write it down, even as a one-page table:
| Content | Owner | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Alerts and closures | Principal or front office, with a named backup | As needed |
| Calendar | Front office | Weekly |
| Lunch menu | Food services | Monthly |
| News | A staff member or volunteer | Weekly |
| Staff directory | Front office | Each term, and whenever someone joins or leaves |
| Class pages | Each teacher | Weekly |
| Forms | The office that receives them | Before each enrollment period |
Common mistakes
- A calendar that stops in the middle of the year
- A news page whose latest post is two years old
- Staff who left still listed in the directory
- A rotating photo slider pushing the useful links down the page
- Important documents that only exist as scanned PDFs
- One person who knows how to update the site, and nobody else
See how we approach this on our websites for schools page.
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