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A school website report card: Does yours make the grade?

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By Jay Cooper
Jan 10, 2019 12:20:21 PM

On a scale of 1-10, how good is your website? If you were to give your website a grade, what would it be? A, B? B-minus? Are you just pulling that grade or number out of thin air? Just what are the criteria you use for assessing your website?

What are your website’s strengths? Where does it fall short? Just how would you go about coming up with a grading rubric for your website?

Well, the one answer to all these questions and where to get an objective school website ‘report card’ is the School Website Assessment.


"...to help school communicators gain a measured understanding of their current website’s strengths and weaknesses."


A.k.a. the “website grader,” the School Website Assessment is an examination that puts school websites through a thorough evaluation based on the factors that are driving successful school websites and digital communications.

It’s a free, comprehensive evaluation of a school website’s design, mobile friendliness, usability, and accessibility. The results are generated based on a combination of software scans and a review by a certified specialist in digital communications. The assessment ‘grades’ specific criteria to create a 16-point checklist.

Website assessment

“Many school administrators don’t know where their website stands when it comes to key indicators that determine what makes for a great website,” said Steve Williams, director of the SchoolNow Academy and chief product designer at SchoolNow.

“We created this to help school communicators gain a measured understanding of their current website’s strengths and weaknesses – create a report card – and form a foundation for improvement.

“This assessment definitely puts a website through its paces. It’s not for the faint of heart,” said Williams. “Schools will get a good hard look at what is and what is not working well on their website.”

The criteria for the School Website Assessment span such key criteria as branding design standards, color use, logo quality, navigation, load speed, usability, mobile friendliness, accessibility and more.

This service was developed and is being made available by the SchoolNow Academy, the school communications learning forum and educational arm of SchoolNow.

If you have any questions about the School Website Assessment, or want to know where your website stands, let me know or just go ahead and sign up for school's website report card here.

 

School Website Planning Guide Download Now

Topics: Website accessibility Website design Content management

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About the author

Marketing director and content strategist for SchoolNow, Jay’s a former school public relations specialist who’s helped businesses, schools and colleges use the power of communications to improve their image, generate support, and optimize relationships. Reach him at jay@schoolnow.com.