Hindsight is 20/20, especially after a school website redesign.

Once the new site is live, it becomes easier to see what worked, what slowed the project down, and what should have been decided months earlier. 

• Maybe the homepage looks great, but families still struggle to find the lunch menu.
   
• Maybe the design feels slick, but old PDFs and outdated pages made migration harder than expected.
   
• Maybe everyone approved the navigation in a meeting, but users started searching for information in a completely different way.
   
• Maybe you should have been a doctor...

That doesn’t necessarily mean the redesign failed. The website is doing what school websites always do: revealing how people actually look for answers, take action, and connect with your school.

The best redesigns are shaped long before launch day. They start with the right conversations, the right content decisions, and the right plan for how the site will keep working after it goes live.

Here are the website redesign decisions schools often wish they had made earlier and how your team can think a little differently.

They focused too much on the homepage

The homepage gets a lot of attention during a redesign, and for good reason. It sets the tone, shows off your brand, and helps families understand who you are.

But your homepage is only one part of the experience.

Families are often visiting your site with a specific task in mind, like reviewing the lunch menu, double-checking the calendar, or tracking down the athletic director’s email in the staff directory.

A beautiful homepage can’t make up for a confusing site structure.

The regret usually sounds like, “We spent so much time perfecting the homepage, but not enough time thinking through the pages families use every day.”

Earlier in the redesign process, your school should identify the highest-value user paths.

• What are families trying to do? 
• What information do they need most often?
• Which pages should be no more than one or two clicks away? 
• Which calls-to-action need to appear across the site, not only on the homepage?

The homepage should guide people, but it shouldn’t carry the entire website. Strong interior pages, simple navigation, helpful search, and consistent page layouts matter just as much as the first impression.

They organized the site around departments instead of family needs.

It’s easy to build navigation around how your school is structured internally. That structure may make sense to your team, but it may not match how families think.

A parent looking for the school supply list may not know whether to check academics, student life, or a division page. A prospective family looking for tuition may not know whether it lives under admissions, financial aid, or affordability. A board member looking for meeting information may not know which department owns that content and is wondering who to yell at...

If your website navigation mirrors internal departments too closely, users have to understand your org chart before they can find an answer.

Using Google Analytics data, the Northville Public Schools team studied how families used the old website and identified which pages and tools they used most.

They reorganized navigation around how families actually search for information, rather than internal district structures.

“We shifted the narrative from who owns it to who needs it,” explained Darby Hoppenstedt, the district’s director of community partnerships and wellness. “In a department-centric model, if a parent didn’t know which specific department managed a resource, the information became difficult to access.”

The district simplified labels and navigation using family-friendly language, like “Bus Routes” instead of “Transportation” and “Lunch Menus” instead of “Food Service.” 

Current families, prospective families, students, staff, alumni, job seekers, and community members may all come to the website for different reasons, but your redesign should make those paths easier to follow.

Main navigation, landing pages, and quick links should reflect the way people search for information. Schools can still organize content internally by owner, but the public-facing structure should help families get where they need to go without guessing.

They waited too long to clean up content

Content cleanup is one of the most underestimated parts of a redesign.

At the beginning, everyone wants to talk about the new look. Then migration starts, and the team finds years-old pages, duplicate PDFs, outdated staff bios, expired announcements, inconsistent program descriptions, and pages no one has touched in three years.

That’s when the redesign starts to feel like a much heavier lift, and if content strategy starts too late, your team has fewer options. 

You either migrate too much content and bring along the old problems into the new site, or you rush through edits near the end of the project. Neither path feels great.

Begin cleaning up content well before design decisions are finalized. 

“As you start the website redesign process, you have to decide on your fonts and colors and all those decisions first,” shared Brad Ashley, Bronxville Union Free School District’s director of technology.

“We weren’t ready to do that part of it until we'd done some of this background work. That investment of just getting that stuff updated and a little bit revitalized — what an impact it made overall.”

Good questions to ask earlier:

• Is this page still accurate?
• Does this page serve a current audience?
• Is the information duplicated somewhere else?
• Could this PDF become a web page?
• Does this page have an owner?
• Does the page lead people to the next step?

A redesign is one of the most logical chances to fix it, but only if the cleanup starts early enough.

They didn’t involve the right people early enough

Communications may lead the website redesign, but the website belongs to the entire school community.

Admissions, enrollment, academics, athletics, advancement, human resources, technology, business office, transportation, division leaders, and school leadership… they all shape the experience in different ways, and each team owns information that families care about. Each team also brings a different view of what the website needs to support.

Late input can create last-minute changes, delayed approvals, duplicated work, and internal frustration. Leadership may ask for a new priority after the design is nearly approved, or admissions may need stronger calls to action. IT may flag technical needs after content migration has already started.

The answer is not to invite everyone to every meeting. That can slow the project down, too.

Keep Reading: Help! There Are Too Many People Involved in My School Website's Redesign!

A better approach is to identify stakeholders early and give each group a defined role. Some people need to provide input, while others need to approve. Some need to create the content, and some need training for data entry.

The earlier you define those roles, the smoother the redesign becomes.

They designed for desktop first

School website designs are often reviewed on laptops, in conference rooms, during meetings. That can make the desktop feel like the default, single experience.

But families don’t experience your site that way all the time.

Visitors to Union Presbyterian Seminary may be checking the calendar from a phone in or reading an enrollment deadline after work and searching for a staff email from the parking lot.

More than half of your site traffic will likely come from mobile devices.

Design for desktop first, and you may miss how much the experience changes on a smaller screen. A page that looks perfect on desktop can feel bloated on mobile, while a button can fall too far down the page.

Mobile-first planning should shape the redesign from the start, and that shift can change the way teams review designs and content. It keeps the focus on actual users, not only pretty designs...

They forgot the post-launch plan

Launch day feels like the finish line, but it’s really the handoff.

Once the new site is live, your team needs a plan for keeping it strong. Without one, even a great redesign can start to feel old fast. Pages get outdated, no one updates the news page, and departments start making one-off updates that don’t match the rest of the site.

The regret is usually: “We planned for launch, but we didn’t plan for what came after.”

A post-launch plan should cover governance, training, analytics, content reviews, permissions, and ongoing support. It should answer questions like:

• Who owns each major section?
• How often should high-traffic pages be reviewed?
• Who can publish directly?
• Who needs approval before publishing?
• What should happen when a staff member leaves?
• How will the team review analytics after 30, 60, and 90 days?
• How will seasonal content be updated before enrollment, admissions, back-to-school, and graduation?

It doesn’t need to be complicated, but it should be documented and easy for people to follow. A quarterly content review, a simple editor checklist, and a recurring analytics review can keep the website from becoming a "once-every-five-years project."

They underestimated accessibility and usability

Accessibility and usability should be part of the redesign conversation from the beginning.

Every visitor deserves a website that’s easier to read, navigate, understand, and use.

Accessibility includes design choices like color contrast, font size, page structure, headings, alt text, video captions, link text, forms, and keyboard navigation.

Usability includes the everyday experience of finding information, reading content, completing a form, or moving from one page to the next without confusion.

A website can look great but still create barriers.

Schools often regret treating accessibility as a late-stage review instead of an early planning principle. It’s much easier to make thoughtful decisions during content, design, and development than to fix a large number of issues after launch—or after an accessibility complaint.

“We’ve converted all major documents, like the School Policy Manual, handbooks, and operational guides, into Posts,” shared Kallie Cooper of Liberty Common School. “It makes them easier to update, search, and keep accessible across devices.”

That shift helped the school comply with Colorado’s accessibility legislation, which mandates that all public entities, including schools, maintain accessible websites. “Posts are structured in a way that supports screen readers, keyboard navigation, and other accessibility tools,” said Kallie. “It’s helped us serve all members of our community.”

They treated the redesign like a design project instead of a communications project

The visuals matter, yes. They shape first impressions, reflect your brand, and help your school stand out.

But at the end of the day, your school website is a messaging tool— a communications project.

Your website carries your school’s voice, priorities, proof points, trust signals, and calls-to-action. It helps families understand your school, and it guides prospective families toward inquiry or application. It helps current families stay informed.

Schools may regret spending months on layout decisions while leaving messaging, page copy, audience journeys, and calls-to-action until the end.

A stronger redesign process asks communication questions early:

• What do we want families to understand?
• What do we want them to feel?
• What do we want them to do next?
• Where are people getting stuck?
• Which messages need to be more consistent across departments?
• Which pages need stronger calls-to-action?

A flash design can create attention, but the words, structure, and next steps turn that attention into action.

They didn’t plan for SEO/AEO

Families don’t always follow the journey your team created.

They use Google, they click old links from emails, they bookmark pages, and now they’re asking AI to find staff names, tuition, job openings, athletic schedules, and more.

If search engine and answer engine optimization isn’t part of the redesign plan, families may struggle even after the new site launches.

Helpful early decisions include creating redirects, writing descriptive page titles, cleaning up outdated pages, using family-friendly keywords, and reviewing the search terms people already use on the site.

A redesign should not make information harder to find for people who don’t use the main navigation. Search is part of the user journey.

They didn’t train enough editors before launch

The CMS matters, the design matters, but the editors are the ones who keep the site useful after launch. A website redesign can lose its quality quickly when too many people publish without shared standards.

That doesn’t mean your school should limit editing to one person forever. It means editors need training, role clarity, and guidelines before they start updating pages.

The regret sounds like this: “The site looked great at launch, but then every section started to look different.”

One person uploads oversized images, while the new coach creates long pages without headings. Someone else adds vague link descriptions like “click here,” and all these small issues add up.

Editor training should teach people how to maintain the site's quality, including formatting, accessibility basics, image guidelines, page length, link text, file naming, content expiration, and when to ask for help.

You should also decide who gets access and what level of access they need beforehand—because taking away privileges once they’ve had access is hard (and awkward).

Key Takeaway

The best time to make these decisions is before the redesign begins. The second-best time is before launch.

A school website redesign gives your team a rare opportunity to rethink how families find information, how departments share updates, and how your school builds trust online. When you look past the homepage and plan for content, mobile, accessibility, training, and long-term ownership, your new site can look better and work better for the people who rely on it every day.

You won’t regret it.

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. At Finalsite, 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.