Yesterday evening I was reading the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog and some other blogs recommending designing websites for users with a consequence of improving their position in search engines. Then I had a dream that I should say about it, so I decided to write about a particular example of this – websites of schools.
Websites are for users. This statement is obviously true, but its consequences are usually ignored. So we should know who could use a website of a school. In my opinion these would be teachers, students, their parents and people who consider to became a part of one of these groups.
As a student of a Polish secondary school with IB DP and its website administrator, I was obviously interested in websites of such schools. Therefore the following arguments will apply mostly to such cases. For younger students some decisions possibly might be different than for this type of school.
So what would each of these groups want from the website? Some ideas:
- teachers
- some space to share learning materials with the students
- students
- materials which would replace the use of books (some students would help the teachers to write them)
- parents
- photos of their children?
- future students and parents
- what will be taught, what will it give them, how much it will cost, what will be the social part of it be, etc
I have no idea what a future teacher might look for.
Many months ago when I compared websites of all Polish schools with IB DP, none of them provided all of these features. Only the one which I administered had learning materials. Information for future students is limited everywhere.
In Poland there is an additional problem – we use Polish language while for IB DP English is used (French and Spanish are not used for it in Poland). Some websites were in English, some in Polish, some had two language versions. Usually parents know only Polish, students and teachers know both languages but using Polish for IB DP-related tasks may be difficult for them. Let’s assume that everything is in one language, this problem affects only real life and not this post.
What’s more interesting, we cannot measure how successful the websites are. It is impossible to determine how changes in the website would affect the number of new IB DP students in a given school. Using the above list of materials useful for particular groups of people, most of these websites may be considered worthless. So let’s assume that brochureware websites work if they can be found. So the position in a search engine search determines it.
Search engines index content. They prefer content to which useful sites link. So publicly available learning materials are good for this, since others might find them useful and link to them.
It has another advantage – people completely unrelated to IB DP might use it. Most popular search queries for my school’s website were for short stories usually read in gimnazja, schools immediately before secondary schools. We had these short stories also at IB DP Language A1. So I believe that a student might want to attend a school which published material which they used before? Maybe it is known for MIT but not for IB DP schools in Poland.
