Website Design, SEO & Branding for Schools and Academy Trusts

Good school website design starts with the people who visit most: parents. They want term dates, the latest letters, lunch menus, club timetables and how to report an absence, usually on a phone and often in a hurry. We plan your navigation around those everyday tasks, then make room for the bigger story of your school: its values, its curriculum and the experiences pupils get. The result is a site that feels like your school, answers questions before they reach the office and gives families confidence. See how we approach website design more generally.

The DfE publishes separate guidance on what maintained schools must publish online and what academies must or should publish. Between them they cover admission arrangements, Ofsted reports, curriculum, behaviour, charging and complaints policies, the SEN information report, pupil premium and PE and sport premium statements, equality objectives, and for trusts, governance details, executive pay bands and audited accounts. Your safeguarding and child protection policy also needs to be publicly available. We build a clear structure for all of it and can run a website audit to spot gaps on your current site.

Under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, schools and nurseries have a partial exemption, but content needed for essential online administrative functions must still be accessible, and most schools sensibly aim for the whole site. The Government Digital Service checks public sector sites against WCAG 2.2 AA, so that is the standard we build to: good colour contrast, readable fonts, proper headings, keyboard navigation, alt text and forms that work with screen readers. We also help you publish a clear accessibility statement and show your staff how to keep new pages and documents accessible.

Academy trust website design brings its own challenge: one trust, several schools, each with its own identity and community. We can create a central trust site for governance, accounts, policies and recruitment, with linked school sites that share a design system but keep their own colours, photos and voice. That keeps trust-level information in one place, cuts duplication for your central team and gives every school a site it is proud of. If your trust is growing, our brand identity work can help new schools join the family smoothly.

SEO for schools is mostly about two moments. The first is admissions, when families search for schools near them, look up open evenings and compare their options before applying. The second is recruitment, when teachers and support staff search for roles in your area. We make sure your admissions pages, open event details and vacancies are clear, well structured and properly indexed, and that your Google Business Profile shows the right address, phone number and hours. Our SEO consulting keeps it simple and honest.

A school website is only as good as its last update. We build sites your office and admin teams can edit confidently, with simple templates for news, newsletters, letters home, events and vacancies, and we train staff so they are not left guessing. When you need a hand, our website support and hosting keep everything secure, backed up and running smoothly through the busiest weeks of the school year, from September starts to admissions deadlines.