How to do A Complete Audit of Your School District Website
A well-organized, user-friendly website is crucial for school districts to communicate effectively with students, parents, staff, and the broader community.
Conducting a comprehensive website audit helps identify areas for improvement, remove obsolete information, and ensure consistency across all district and school websites. This guide will walk you through the process, offering practical tips to ensure your websites remain reliable, accessible, and engaging for your community.
Why Conduct a District-Wide Website Audit?
Conducting an audit of your school district website alone can be a big project. Depending on the size of your school district, it may or may not be realistic to also audit your school websites. Auditing all of your websites can help improve user experience, enhance accessibility, and optimize your content for search engines throughout your school community. If you don’t have time to review every website, even just going through your district website in-depth can have a positive impact. An effective school district website audit helps you:
Improve User Experience (UX)
Streamlining navigation and reducing page load times improves the online experience for all users. In an audit, you can identify and remove old content to create a more streamlined experience (and better represent your district’s brand online).
Enhance Accessibility Compliance
School district and school websites must comply with ADA and WCAG guidelines to ensure users of all abilities can use the websites. Use your audit to check for accessibility errors that are easy for automated testing to miss on your website.
Optimize for Search Engines
An audit helps enhance search engine visibility, allowing users to find information faster by ensuring best practices are implemented on every page.
Including School Websites in your Audit
Auditing both the district website and each school website allows you to ensure consistency across the entire school community. A comprehensive approach has a lot of benefits, but it can take time to implement, especially if you have lots of schools in your district. Depending on your website provider, and how easily you can centrally manage data for your schools, you may want to consider including school websites in your audit. Here are some of the benefits to including your school websites in the audit:
Unified Brand Identity
Ensure that schools logos, colors, and overall messaging align with district standards, giving the entire community a cohesive online experience. You might notice ways school webmasters can make changes that affect the brand, like updating fonts or colours. You can also review central content management features that help keep messaging consistent, such as sharing website pages directly with school sites.
Create Consistency
Consistent navigation and design across school sites make it easier for users to navigate between district-level and school-level information. This is particularly helpful for parents with children in multiple schools, enabling them to find information without adapting to different formats. If you work with a specialized website provider for K-12, it’s likely your school websites already share a similar design. If you use Open Source platforms, such as WordPress, this consistency can be harder to implement and maintain.
Up-to-Date Information
It’s easy to forget to remove seasonal information, which can cause a website to become cluttered quickly. School-specific content, such as event calendars, staff directories, and program details, changes frequently. Regular audits of individual school sites help ensure that each page has current, relevant information, reducing confusion and providing a trustworthy source for the community.
Unique Needs of Each School Community
Each school may have unique programs, extracurricular activities, or events that require individual attention. Audits allow each school to highlight its strengths and provide the specific information its community needs.
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