Your school’s website design is likely to have bigger effect on success of your overall school marketing strategy. With the internet becoming more and more important in the day to day lives of all of us, schools marketing teams must respond effectively. A strong school website design will helps to attract parents to site in the first place through search engine. Your website represents who you are and what you offer.
Websites factors like Use the right colors for your audience to draw attention to select elements,using Flash animations because they look cool is the wrong strategy, create a clear navigation structure, and organize page elements in a grid fashion,use fonts, font sizes, and font colors that are easy to read. For easier page scanning, use bullet lists, section headers, and short paragraphs,needs to have a good flow from page to page,one of the biggest factors to keep visitors on your website is having a good, solid navigation system that supports all search preferences.all these are essential success factors for a website.
A good Website Design Consists of essential tools:-
The first thing you see is "logo". This is often because it’s large and set at what has been shown in studies to be the first place people look (the top left). It tell user to what site they are viewing.
Line Spacing, White Space and Padding:
When we lay text out, the space between lines directly affects how readable it appears. Too little space makes it easy for our eye to spill over from one line to next, too much space means that we finish one line of text and go to the next our eye can get lost.Padding is the space between elements and text. The simple rule here is that you should always have space there.white space not need to be white. The term simply refers to empty space on page. White space used to give balance, proportion and contrast to page. A lot of white space tends to make thing seems more elegant.
Orientation indicates Where are you now?
There are lots of ways we can orient a user so there is no excuse not to. In small sites, it might be just matter of a big heading or ‘down’ version of the appropriate button in our menu. In a larger site, we might use bread crumb trails, sub-headings and a site map for the truly lost.
Alignment:
Keep things lined up is as important in Webdesigning as it is in print design. That’s not to say,everything should be in a straight line, but rather that we should go through and try to keep things consistently placed on page. Aligning makes our design more ordered and digestible, as well as making it seems more polished.
Consistency:
Consistency mean making everything matched. Heading size, font choice, coloring, button style, spacing, designelement, illustration style, photo choice, etc. Everything should be themed to make our design coherent between pages and on the same page.The simple way to maintain consistency is to make early decisions and stick to them. With a really large site,things can change in the design process.
and lots of more.....
