What is the World's Best School Website? Nominate & Win Big Prizes

We are looking for the best school website in the world.  Yes Numero Uno:  If you have seen an amazing school website that is innovative and has some great resources for teachers, parents and students.  Oh Yeah!  It might need to look cool too.  Then we need to know about it.

We are looking for nominations between now and the end of September.  And then passing the voting out our readers to identify the winner of the Inaugural World's Greatest School Website Award.

There will be a grand prize handed out to the person that nominates the winning site. ( in case of multiple nominations we will randomly select a winner from that group.) of...

A brand new website for your school valued @ $550 or if you want to be greedy alternately you can have A professional Blog / Website of your own valued @ $550.  We must thank Belinda @ TechZoo for this great prize ( Who make some awesome school sites themselves. ) Which will be Drawn in October.  Some runners up mystery prizes will be on offer that we will announce soon.

Sooo...  Post your nominations in the comment space below and check back regularly as we will be posting many of these great sites up over the next few weeks. Nominations close September 30. Don't Miss out!

5 things Every School Website Should Have

Recently Belinda from TechZoo updated our school website and she has designed a number of school web sites for schools around the world.  We were having a discussion about the must haves on a school website and these were the 5 essentials we thought every school website should have.

1:  Welcoming and Friendly Design:  Ultra cool should not be your aim on a school website.  Prospective parents and students want to feel a welcoming and friendly vibe - bright colours and lots of photos of opens spaces and happy students.  First impressions last.  Certainly an ugly cheap looking front page website will do you just as much harm if not more.

2: Current and Up-to Date info:  If your last newsletter was posted when Noah built an Ark or the canteen list is out of date visitors will instantly gain a sense of neglect and mismanagement.  Remember a website today is your schools biggest marketing tool.

3:  Who is who?  Don't go overboard here - Who is your principal?  And what are their thoughts?  Maybe a group photo of your staff and any other major roles that parents will regularly want to contact beyond their child's classroom teacher.

4:  Classroom Blogs:  Any web designer worth a pinch of salt should be able to set up simple blogs for areas of the school that want them.  Prospective Parents really get a feel for what is happening at the coal face from these.  Especially if there is some stuff there from students.

5:  Good Photo's:  I can't believe schools invest tens of thousands on resources and can't get a decent digital SLR to take photos that look as great on a website as they do in reality.

Finally make sure your school has easy to find contact info and maps.

If you follow these guidelines you should have yourself a pretty good website and don't hesitate to contact Belinda if your school needs a cheap and effective website.  It's what she does for a living.