Education website design examples

Separate routes for prospective students, current students, parents and staff; a page for each course with entry requirements, content, outcomes and cost; a permanently visible application route with deadlines; honest destination data; and bookable open days. Maintained schools also have a statutory list of information that must be published online, which is worth auditing rather than assuming.

For public sector bodies, yes, as a legal requirement. The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations require websites to meet WCAG 2.2 AA and to publish an accessibility statement. Independent providers are not caught by the same regulations but still have Equality Act duties, and given the audience it is the wrong place to cut corners in any case. We build to AA as standard.

A page per course, written around what someone searching actually types, which is usually the qualification name plus a location or a delivery mode. Include the price, the entry requirements and the outcome. Providers who hide cost behind an enquiry form get more enquiries and far fewer enrolments, because most of those enquiries were people establishing whether it was affordable.

Practical things first: term dates, uniform, admissions, contact details and policies. Then the things that shape a decision: results, Ofsted, ethos, pastoral care and what the place is actually like. The most common failure is burying the practical information beneath the marketing, which frustrates the parents you already have in order to impress the ones you do not.

Yes, and honestly, including the years that were not your best. Prospective students and parents can find this data elsewhere, so presenting it selectively damages trust more than a mediocre figure ever would. Context is fair and encouraged; omission tends to be noticed.

Yes. Open day and event booking is straightforward and immediately useful. Applications depend on your systems — many providers use a central application service or a student record system, and the sensible approach is usually to hand off cleanly to it rather than duplicate it. What matters is that the route is obvious and never breaks mid-way.

Scale and audience mix. A university is running hundreds of course pages, international recruitment, research content and staff systems at once, so information architecture becomes the dominant problem. A school is smaller but has a heavier statutory publication burden and a parent audience with very practical daily needs. Both fail in the same way, by letting the marketing layer smother the useful one.

It depends almost entirely on the number of course pages. The framework is a few weeks; populating a large prospectus takes longer and benefits from being structured properly so course data can be maintained by staff rather than requiring a developer every September.