There’s no doubt that a well-designed school website is a powerful tool for communication. Regularly updating your site, however, to ensure that it meets current requirements is important.
If it’s been a few years since you did that, it could be time to take a closer look at how responsive your site currently is.
What is Mobile Readiness?
It’s about ten years ago that Apple issued the first iPhone and things have changed pretty quickly since then. We use our smartphones for a lot nowadays and that includes searching the web. Old style websites weren’t geared to being shown such on a small screen – the text is tiny and it’s pretty difficult to navigate.
To compensate, developers began including code that made sites mobile friendly. The benefit of this is that anyone viewing your site, on any device, will be able to use it without squinting their eyes or trying to expand the page.
If you’re school website is fairly old, the chances are that it won’t be mobile ready at all and that could mean you are missing out on a whole bunch of communication opportunities with pupils and parents as well as local stakeholders.
Poor websites can be penalised by Ofsted and that includes if you haven’t updated your pages to make them mobile ready.
How To Check If Your School Website is Mobile Friendly
It’s actually pretty easy to check whether your school site is fit for mobile users. Just pick up your smartphone and bring up the home page. If it looks like it does on a desktop and the writing is too small to see, that should signify that you have a problem.
You may also find that your website is mobile friendly but that it’s not as easy to navigate as you hoped. That could be down to the underlying coding or even the usability of the site. That may mean, therefore, you need to update the design so that it works better for parents and pupils.
What to Do Next
Mobile readiness isn’t the only thing that you need to have in place for your school website. Ofsted has a whole list of different compliance guidelines that are designed to make communication better. It can be difficult to track these so the first thing you need to do is have a full audit of your site.
At Parentapps.com, we know all there is to know about Ofsted compliance and can take an impartial look at your current school website. That includes helping you create a site that is mobile ready and responsive, whatever device it is being viewed on. We can also assist with ensuring that your site has a good level of usability and is fit for purpose.
We are even able to advise on areas such as great content creation and how to protect your site users in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. If it’s been a while since your school website was updated and you are worried that it is not mobile ready, contact our professional and friendly team today to find out more.