Does your school website build trust with visitors? Does it showcase your expertise and experience? It should do, and if it doesn’t, you might be putting off prospective students or their parents. Whether you’re a nursery, primary school, secondary school, private school or higher education provider, this is so important for your online presence.
We explain some of the simple yet effective ways to build trust and promote experience and expertise on your website. For a more personalised discussion on this subject, reach out to a WEBPRO Education team member soon.
The importance of trust, expertise and experience
The vast majority of websites are eCommerce businesses trying to sell a product. The need for these businesses to establish trust with their prospective customers is essential, which is tied in with promoting experience and expertise in their specific niche. However, Education providers must also do these things online.
After all, parents want to ensure the people responsible for their children and their education can be trusted to provide a safe learning environment that meets each student’s individual needs.
If you don’t portray these things online, parents and prospective students could be put off and look at alternative education providers instead. Below we will discuss some of the ways to do this through your website. Some of these tasks are low-hanging fruit and easy wins for your organisation…
Have an effective “about page”
A school, college or university website should include an about page that tells the reader the important facts about the institution as a whole. This page shouldn’t focus on individuals within the school, college or university, but rather, the whole establishment. It’s an opportunity to show that the school has long-term success by stating combined levels of experience and student achievements. If possible, these pages should include any awards the school has received, and ideally showcase a good or excellent Ofsted rating where applicable.
You might have a lot of information to get across. But none of it will be read if it isn’t made easy to consume by the reader. To do this, you’ll need a well-designed page that breaks up the content with images and headings. A school timeline can be a unique addition to make the information more visual for the reader.
Your team profile page
The best websites will then have a separate page to focus on the individuals within the establishment, such as teachers, specialists and other support staff. The page should showcase the accreditation and qualifications of these individuals so that readers feel confident that students will receive a stellar education from people who really care.
It can be better to include a brief introduction about each professional explaining why they became teachers, etc. It’s also necessary to provide bespoke professional images of these staff members to humanise the content. Don’t ever use standard stock images in place of real people, as this can break trust. WEBPRO Education has professional content creators and web designers to help you with these pages.
An innovative technique
About pages and team profile pages are fairly standard inclusions on an education provider’s website. It’s important to get these right first, but there are more innovative ways of building trust and showing that students will receive a high standard of education. One innovative technique is to include videos within your website.
You could use a video to:
- Introduce teachers
- Explain courses or individual subjects
- Show the school’s facilities, including classrooms or sporting facilities, etc.
- Interview existing students about their experiences
- Explain processes, such as admissions
Recap: Education providers need to win the trust of students and their parents when promoting their establishment and subjects. They also need to make students and parents feel confident that the staff within the organisation are qualified to provide the education they need and genuinely care about their development. This requires special attention and content within about pages and team profile pages. Using video to humanise the organisation and showcase the school, college or university is also effective.
WEBPRO Knows
More than half of school, college and university website traffic comes from a smartphone. So you need to make sure your pages are compatible with smaller screens!
