School Website Usability awards – July
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011This month we kicked off our school website reviews with the following five schools:
St Andrew’s College, Dublin (site by e4education)
St Nicholas’ Church of England Combined School, Berkshire (site by PrimarySite)
The Snaith School, Doncaster (site by GreenSchoolsOnline)
St Philip Howard Catholic High School, West Sussex (site by e4education)
St Augustine of Canterbury RC Primary School, Lancashire (site by PrimarySite)
And the winners are…
Best School Homepage
Winner: St Nicholas CE Combined School
Its beauty is in its simplicity – it’s clean and clear with four distinct navigation options and items on the home page kept to a minimum so everything fits within the viewable space. It looks smart but friendly and the content they do choose to include is personable (‘house points’) and fresh (calendar and news). A perfect user-friendly starting point.
Highly commended: St Augustine of Canterbury RC Primary School
This is a flashy site and certainly eye catching; this sort of graphic can distract from the business of navigation but not so here. It does take a few more seconds to see where you would go next but the options are simple, clear and there are some creative ideas for display like the class names on the sign post and the ticker tape notice on the street sign. A great example of how you can be creative without compromising usability.
Best Navigation
Winner: St Andrew’s College
This site has hundreds of pages and it successfully manages to navigate you through them by using a banner image between top and left navigation so you can retain both as you move through, and a clear two and three-tiered navigation displaying some very long lists and sub-sections. Not easily done and rarely done so stylishly.
Highly commended: St Augustine’s and St Nicholas’s
These sites have been designed by the same people and both have the clear uncluttered left navigation as well as ‘Back to’ breadcrumb style links on every page to take you back to where you last were; a great simple idea that’s very comforting for the user.
Best look and feel
Winner: St Augustine’s
It’s hard not to award this to this great looking site but the reason it deserves so much praise is because it’s been done at no cost to usability and content, as is so often the case. Gorgeous!
Highly commended: The Snaith School
Within the site the design is smart but plain but this is for that opening page with the huge real-school images, like a grand entrance hall welcoming you in. Great pictures and great uncompromising use of them.
Best Parent Information
Winner: St Philip Howard
The comprehensive information contains some thoughtful touches such as information on keeping your child safe online and supporting your child with revision and mixes media rich content, like a welcome video and virtual tour, with printable pdfs.
Highly commended: St Nicholas CE combined School
For loads of lovely personal information like how the Hot Dog sale got on and which children are road safety officers. Whoever maintains this site deserves a massive gold star for effort and for just being themselves.
Win an award!
We will be reviewing five school websites a month and giving out awards. Have you got a brilliant school website? Nominate it below and we will review it next month.
