Building a school website is an exciting project filled with opportunities to showcase your school's unique personality and achievements. Before you get caught up in stunning visuals and compelling content, there's a crucial step that often gets overlooked: creating your school’s sitemap.
A sitemap is your website's skeletal structure—the roadmap that guides how your pages connect and how users navigate your content. It's a strategic document with far-reaching impact, influencing everything from user experience to SEO.
Why is a Sitemap Important?
- User Experience: A well-designed sitemap ensures your website is easy to navigate. This means visitors can quickly find the important pages and information they need, leading to a positive experience and a greater appreciation for your school.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Search engines use sitemaps to understand your website's structure and content. A clear and logical sitemap improves your ranking in search results, making it easier for prospective families to find you online.
- Foundation for Design: A sitemap provides a blueprint for your website's navigation. This helps your design team create a user interface that is both visually appealing and functionally effective.
Creating an Effective Sitemap For Your School Website
Creating a sitemap might seem like a boring technical task, but it's actually a creative opportunity to shape how your school's story unfolds online. By carefully considering your audience's needs, analyzing your website data, and planning for a seamless mobile experience, you can create a sitemap that's intuitive, SEO-friendly, and delivers an exceptional user experience.
Navigation: Guiding Your Users
When starting a school website redesign, the creative team often asks the school to describe its desired visual aesthetic with a few adjectives. While terms like "traditional," "colorful," or "bold" are expected, "easy to navigate" emerges as a frequent request.
This common desire presents a challenge: how do you design a site that's truly "easy to navigate?"
Essentially, navigation is about providing users with the tools they need to move efficiently through your site, easily find information, and complete tasks. The most fundamental navigation element is your main menu, typically located in the header.
Other tools, like section menus, search bars, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, clickable images, and call-to-action buttons, also contribute to a smooth user experience.
How to Create a Website Sitemap
Before getting into navigation best practices, it's essential to create a sitemap. Think of your sitemap as a blueprint that guides your design team in serving your navigational needs.
Consider these three categories when you start your planning:
1. Main Navigation: The Heart of Your Website
Think of your main navigation as the table of contents for your school's story. It's the primary way visitors access the most important information about your school. This section usually lives in your website's header, and it should provide a clear overview of what your school offers.
- What to Include: Focus on the essential pages that every website visitor might need, such as "About Us," "Academics," "Admissions," "Arts," "Athletics," and "Giving."
- Keep it Concise: While it might be tempting to include everything, aim for no more than eight top-level pages in your main navigation. Too many options can overwhelm visitors.
- Tiered Structure: Organize your main navigation with a tiered structure.
- Tier 1: These are your top-level pages (e.g., "Academics").
- Tier 2: These are the pages that sit under your top-level pages (e.g., "Lower School," "Middle School," "Upper School" under "Academics").
- Why Tiers Matter: Thinking about these two tiers helps you map out the relationships between pages and create a logical flow for your visitors.
The Harvey School’s hamburger menu helps organize a detailed but intuitive menu and site structure.
2. Utility Navigation: Enhancing the User Experience
Utility navigation is all about those extra elements that make your website more user-friendly and help visitors find what they need quickly. Put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors. Are they able to find what they need quickly and easily? Is the navigation intuitive and consistent across all devices?
- Audience-Specific Links: Does your school have different audiences with unique needs? Create sections with links tailored to them. For example:
- For Parents: Links to the parent portal, calendars, forms, and resources.
- For Faculty/Staff: Links to internal resources, handbooks, and communication tools.
- For Alumni: Links to alumni news, events, and giving opportunities.
- Quicklinks: Provide shortcuts to your most popular pages or external resources. This could include links to:
- The school calendar
- Lunch menus
- The school store
- After-school programs
- Calls to Action: Encourage visitors to take the next step with clear and prominent calls to action. This could include buttons or links for:
- Inquiries
- Campus tours
- Applications
- Donations
The colors and simplicity of International Community School Addis Ababa’s’ navigation keep things neat and comfortable, but notice the action-oriented language used to prompt visitors to join, experience, connect, and more—great strategy!
3. Footer Content: Essential Information and Resources
The footer of your website is often overlooked, but it's valuable real estate! Use it to provide key information and reinforce your school's identity.
- Branding: Include your school logo to maintain brand consistency.
- Contact Information: Make it easy for visitors to get in touch by providing your school's:
- Full address
- Phone number
- Email address
- Map or directions
- Important Links: Include links to essential pages that might not fit in your main navigation, such as:
- Your sitemap
- Privacy policy
- Accessibility statement
- Non-discrimination policy
- Terms of use
- Social Media: Connect with your community by including links to your school's social media profiles.
- Accreditation and Partnerships: Display logos of accreditations and associations to build trust and showcase your school's credentials.
Keep Reading: Footers: The Forgotten Section of School Website Design
Consider these categories when creating your sitemap carefully— you’re laying the foundation for a well-organized and user-friendly website.
Top Navigation Strategies for an Improved User Experience
- Start with Your Current Sitemap: Your current sitemap, regardless of its perceived effectiveness, serves as a valuable starting point. If it's well-organized, there's no need for drastic changes. If it needs improvement, use it as an inventory of existing pages and content to build upon.
- Use Website Analytics: Leverage tools like Google Analytics to understand user behavior. Analyze page visits, time spent on each page, and user interactions to prioritize in-demand content and optimize its accessibility.
- Seek Inspiration: Explore the web designs of other schools and look for website navigation examples from organizations outside of education. Identify effective types of website navigation and potential pain points to inform your own design choices.
School Website Navigation Best Practices
While there's always room for creative expression, adhering to these fundamental principles can significantly enhance your website's navigation:
1. Keep it Simple: A straightforward and predictable navigation structure is crucial. Users should be able to find essential information effortlessly. Prioritize clarity over excessively unique or complex designs.
2. Limit the Number of Options: When looking at your menu, it should be easy for a user to skim through all of the choices very quickly. When users are overwhelmed with too many choices, they may not make any choice (except the choice to leave your site). To avoid overwhelming users, present them with a manageable number of choices. Aim for eight or fewer main navigation items and three or four buttons within a group.
3. Minimize Clicks: Employ drop-down menus or mega menus to enable users to access desired pages directly. This approach also helps users locate pages that might logically belong to multiple sections.
Fort Smith Public Schools puts a lot of these strategies into practice, plus, the simplicity and the icons make for a great mobile user experience.
4. Maintain Consistency: Ensure consistent placement of section menus and other navigational elements throughout the site. This consistency allows users to find and navigate to interior pages without confusion and easy access to important resources and web pages.
5. Use Clear Language: Your website is an organized collection of pages that serve to answer questions and solve the tasks that users come to the site for. It’s not a replication of your school’s departmental structure and internal naming conventions, so employ simple and universally understood terms for page names and menu items. Avoid jargon or internal naming conventions that might confuse users.
For example, page names like “Office of Advancement” or “Pedagogical Approaches” may not be universally understood — but terms like “Alumni” and “Our Approach” will be.
6. Optimize for Mobile: Modern website navigations prioritize a mobile-first design and create a seamless experience across all devices. Ensure that users can easily access all pages, regardless of screen size.
7. Provide Guidance: Actively guide users through your site by adding featured links in mega menus and clear calls to action throughout. Offer guidance by linking to related content or suggesting relevant pages.
Key Takeaway
By following these guidelines and collaborating effectively with your design team, you can create a school website that is both visually appealing and easy to navigate. Begin your redesign with a strategic sitemap, collaborating closely with your design team to ensure it aligns with your goals and user needs. Don't forget to prioritize user experience by making information easy to find, and regularly review and update your sitemap as your school evolves to maintain an organized, relevant, and user-friendly online experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Connor has spent the last decade within the field of marketing and communications, working with independent schools and colleges throughout New England. As Finalsite’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, Connor plans and executes marketing strategies and digital content across the web. A former photojournalist, he has a passion for digital media, storytelling, coffee, and creating content that connects.