Ten features of a Great School Web Design

A school website is more than just an online presence – it’s the digital entrance to your school community, your ideals, your education philosophy.

It is vital your site keeps your specific audience and stakeholders in mind. What are your current and future students’ backgrounds? What are their particular learning needs? Will your staff benefit from their own information and resources portal? Your site design has to be uniquely relevant and based on these particulars.

And a school website needs to be up to speed with current trends and requirements around online learning – while also showcasing your facilities, staff and school events.

The pandemic highlighted the importance of having a functional, adaptable, modern website. More than ever before, your content must be easy to find – and your site has to function smoothly on a mobile phone.

As we head into 2023 and beyond, school website design has never been more important. Here is our list of ten must-have features for a great school website.

1. Design suited to your individual school community
2. Excellent staff/student/parent/community engagement
3. Ease of use/simple navigation
4. Mobile-phone oriented design
5. Quality photography/videography
6. Accessibility and language options
7. Up-to-date online learning systems and school management software
8. Well written, cohesive content
9. Safe and secure hosting
10. Fast loading times, search engine optimisation, and a logical and easy-to-operate content management system (or website backend)

1. Does the Website Design suit your school community?

Is your school community highly diverse and multicultural? Are your students travelling long distances to attend? Does your educational philosophy have an underpinning in arts and creativity? Are you in a small rural town or an inner suburb of a major city?

This unique-to-your-school information all informs your website design. A generic website template won’t cut it. Your school’s online presence must reflect your community’s particular values, interests, aesthetics – and the site design or ‘look’ needs to grab new or returning site visitors.

The colours, content, language, images/icons and structure of your site have to make sense to your viewers, old and new, while turning visitors’ heads your way by presenting information in a striking yet user-friendly style.

2. Ensure your digital presence is as active as your school communities

What do your school stakeholders want to read and access on your website? Do they need details of up-and-coming events, links to newsletters, access to students’ assessments and grades?

That’s where engaging content plus website features such as an interactive events calendar, student/staff portals, school management software, virtual school tours, social media sharing, online resources and more come in.

3. Ease of use & simple navigation is imperative

The structure of your school website’s pages, navigation menus and content can keep viewers eyes on your site and have them eager to find out more – or bounce them away in annoyance and confusion. Your site must be easy and enjoyable to use – with no frustrating arrow-back dead-ends.

Some general rules for simplifying navigation:

• All key content should be located within 1-2 clicks. Don’t bury content your website visitors need to find behind a labyrinth of lead-in pages.
• Keep your main navigation menu to less than 10 tabs. Too many items can confuse viewers.
• Use plain language. Jargon might sound hip, but it doesn’t help comprehension for those not in the know, so avoid using specialised terms or phrases.
• Feature a site-search facility. And let your website visitors access all of your site’s information in one.

4. Mobile-First design

Most websites receive more than half of their total traffic via searches on smart phones, so your school website must look great and function well across numerous different screen sizes and orientations.

Is there a difference between a responsive site versus one designed specifically with mobile viewing in mind? Absolutely. A responsive website design will re-orient itself to fit across several devices. A mobile-first website incorporates changes to the site design to make the smart phone viewing experience equally as pleasing as when viewing it on a desktop.

5. Quality photography/videography

School facilities have a big say on future enrolments and on current student/parent wellbeing and the learning environment; so showcase your classrooms, play areas, music faculty, sports halls, cafeteria and more on your website with high quality images and videos.

Well-lit, expertly framed imagery (including aerial drone footage) is a superb way of catching new student eyes while instilling pride in your present school community.

In addition to your school’s physical features, you can also highlight events, clubs and other extracurricular activities on offer. Displaying these attractively on your website will help you engage with a bigger student audience.

6. Accessibility and language options

Make your website easy to use for people of all abilities, by making it WCAG (Web Content Accesibility Guidelines) compliant.

An accessible school website design will immediately communicate an inclusive approach and values, gain you trust and respect from prospective students and families with differing needs.

Accessibility Options

• Ensure your copy is written with scalability and contrast in mind so it will adapt well to screen-magnifiers.
• Enable the keyboard navigation option, making your website easy to use with assistive technologies and without needing a mouse.
• Minimise moving content, as some people have difficulty tracking moving objects.
• Supply transcripts with any audio or video files for the hearing impaired and consider using Auslan or an appropriate language.
• Make sure colour and contrast throughout your site adhere to accessibility guidelines.
• Include text alternatives (‘alt text’) for any images or illustrations.
• Use text-to-speech software to highlight text on screen as it reads it aloud.

Offering multiple languages for visitors to your site helps students and families feel welcome whatever their culture or ethnicity, to your community. Add a drop-down menu listing all the languages you have available and make your translations are accurate and up-to-date. Read more here about making your website accessible.

7. Up-to-date online learning systems and school management software

One effect of the pandemic has been to boost the importance of an online presence for schools. Many classes, exams, reports, trackers of student progress have moved online, meaning it’s imperative to include a section on your school website detailing how you are adapting in these areas and a sophisticated functional online learning portal which integrates seamlessly onto your website. Online learning is here to stay – and your site has to keep up with trends and technological changes and ever-increasing standards of virtual learning excellence.

There are numerous excellent school management software systems available to help with timetabling, assist parents to keep track of student progress, construct student profiles, aid community engagement and everything your school needs to keep pace in today’s increasingly online world. Your school (and website) can’t afford not to include this most critical of digital tools.

8. Well written, cohesive content

Content writing is the e-window into your school – what it does, what it stands for and what you offer that other schools don’t.

Container-loads of new content are uploaded onto the Internet every day. But how do you to stand out from the mountains of formulaic info? With text and images to stimulate and which make sense to your potential students and their families.

Like it or not, the web is uncompromising, viewers are selective, online attention spans are short, and competition is fierce. Don’t make visitors to your school site sift through oceans of bland, repetitive text. Effective content writing offers readers a lifeline of focused, fresh copy they can really hear and identify with.

9. Safe and secure website hosting

In today’s heavily populated online world, the number of cyber attacks on school websites is on the rise. Everyone accessing your school’s website has to feel confident that their private information is safe — so ensuring that your school’s website has the latest security, firewalls, quality web hosting to safeguard your privacy and data is essential.

All school websites need to have automated, regularly scans for malware, spam & viruses every 24 hours as well as ensuring the IT team at the school have in place the necessary, adaptable digital barriers to fight off ever-increasing volumes of scammers and viruses.

10. Fast loading/Easy to use CMS

Site loading speed has a big influence on whether current or prospective family members will even bother visiting your website. A significant percentage of website visitors will immediately look elsewhere if your site takes more than a few seconds to load.

There’s no point having an eye-catching and beautifully functional website if no one can find you online. A top search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy drives traffic to your site via appropriate key words and search terms positioned within your content. Sharp, energised blog posts combined with intelligent link building are also key.

The aim of the SEO game is to expand your online visibility so search engines such as Google will index your site at a higher rate, putting you nearer the top of search engine pages.

If you want a website that works and looks great, you’ll also need a Content Management System (CMS) that is easy and logical for your staff to use (and doesn’t need driving by a coding expert), thereby simplifying the maintenance and updating of your website. Read more about Content Management Systems here.

Be inspired with some of our School Website Designs here.

 

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These components make up what is called the ‘black space’ of the organisation’s structure as is depicted in a typical organisational chart.

All of them work together to produce what the organisation has to offer to its markets.

This works very well in environments where there is a high degree of control, certainty, and stability.

The ‘gaps’ that occur between these various parts are the interfaces or ‘white spaces,’ where conversations occur to ensure that there are smooth operations and transitions across the whole organisation. This ‘gap’, space and interfaces within the organisation are often where issues reveal themselves that need to be addressed.

Where instability occurs across the organisation, these interfaces are extremely important to understand, negotiate, and navigate.

These spaces and interfaces also exist between the organisation and its external world.

These spaces that occur, in both cases, are described here as the ‘white space’ that exists, both within an organisation and its various parts, and then between the organisation and the ecosystem within which it operates.

The ‘white space’ is the neutral space between the various structures, systems, and entities, where people can explore new opportunities for mutual benefit, and it also provides the reflective space to navigate effectively what is discovered in these exchanges.

Having an objective person who listens and discovers options to be explored within the business, its networks, and in the transition spaces that exist in the business, as it progresses, is called operating in the white space[1].

• Resilient organisations need to be able to simultaneously work effectively in the black space to grow existing opportunities, and in the white space by exploring and scaling new opportunities.
• Working in both types of spaces can be complex and require a different way of thinking and doing, compared to the traditional ways of how the black space operates. Whilst most enterprises are comfortable working in the black space, it is not always the case when they are working in the white space.

In exploring the ‘white space’ of your organisation, that is the in betweenness of the company and the other entities in its system, is where the energy is discovered to provide impetus to the organisation, in terms of motivation, capability, and opportunity realisation.

This is the role of the strategic advisor who focusses on and works diligently in the white space to help identify, navigate, make sense of, and leverage the opportunities in a co-creating way.

In this capacity, the trusted advisor acts as an intermediary, boundary spanner, catalyst, and enabler that can help bring such people together to explore and leverage the identified possibilities.

This person, working within the white space of a business has the capability to observe, engage and talk with all connections that are identified, in a disciplined and rigorous way, to capture the network intelligence that exists in and between all these connections.

As Viktor Frankl said –  ‘Between stimulus and response a choice is made’[2].

The trusted strategic advisor working in this space knows that it is teeming with options to be considered and catalysed.  In exploring the options to be considered and having the wherewithal to expand a company’s surface area, a leader reinvigorates the current state of the business.

This is well illustrated, as follows, by our colleague Peter Murden[3]:

The spark of new energy that happens in this gap involves:

• Listening into the space and between the spaces and the transitions that are occurring both inside the company and the external world.
• Understanding the transitions that occur in the neutral safe space by listening deeply to the context and its implications – the result appears in the new state of the organisation once a decision is made.
• Moving from one state to another occurs in this transition space, not in the current state or the future state of the company.
• Knowing that no one owns this white space, nor controls it, for what comes out of this space is emergent in nature, and the advisor is a catalyst in this regard (Ecosystem Intelligence and new forms of capital).
• Transformational change, since it is in the interfaces that something else can occur, which is unexpected and brings about change as a result.
• Noticing that divergence and convergence of thought that occur in the white space. All the threads that are known are drawn together to establish adaptive advantage into the next state that the company moves toward across its lifecycle.
• Embracing uncertainty for it is in the in-between state and its unfolding processes that may appear unstable and uncertain, which they are, until they are structured into the next state where they once again become stable, until the next gap is discovered (a never-ending process).
• Focusing attention on what is there and what is not there.
• Deep reflection in this space, that is the place of silence and waiting to see what happens and creates the new.  What is new invariably emerges from the ‘white space.’

The Results of Co-design and Co-creation in the ‘White Space’ 

• Observation, analysis, collation, curation, and execution.
• Identifying and implementing new energy sources that motivate the company and its capability through working with others
• Accelerating the response times in terms of new co-created agendas
• Focussing on the transition to a new state, not envisaged by the company in its current state.
• Cultural change, through change in structures and systems, to address emergent needs.

[1] Life Cycle – See Edgelow, C. & Bridges, W., (2000) – Working with Organisational Character, Page 33ff

[2] Frankl, V., (1946) ‘Mans Search for Meaning’

[3] Murden, P., (2023)

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We are fortunate to have had the opportunity to facilitate the establishment of many successful strategic alliances of various types, across a wide range of industry sectors in Australia over the last ten years.

Recently we worked on a joint venture between a not-for-profit organisation and a commercial entity. The results achieved by this alliance clearly illustrates what can be done when a not for profit and a for profit get together to create a nutritional food product that addresses the needs of an ageing population.

By bringing what they have to offer to the table and share their capabilities with each other, within a spirit of cooperation delivered new streams of value to the not-for-profit and increased market share for the for-profit company.

In this case, the results have included an expansion of what these companies are able to offer their customers, as well as a positive return on investment for their own time and effort.

We use the very same method and approach that these companies used in building their relationships with each other.  In this sense we are industry agnostic. Additionally, we supply the very same roadmap that they used to get where they are today.

An essential question to ask yourself is: “What do I want to do?”

You must be completely clear about your answer to this question. You must know precisely what your purpose and business objectives are as well as the values that you hold dear when going into such relationships.

I know with certainty, through extensive experience, that adopting a collaborative business mindset and a business model for small to medium sized organisations has proven merit.  In fact, for many of us, it is the ONLY way that we will be able to compete on a global scale.

Doing business collaboratively is one way of providing innovative solutions – from design through to manufacturing, logistics, installation, after sales service and maintenance – to the bigger customers in your industry sector.

So, where do we start?

All effective business relationships are built on a foundation of trust.

Initially we meet someone, we talk and listen to them, we find areas of common interest, and then we start to make connections with each other which make sense to us.

Understanding the organizational ecology within which it operates and the context that it exists in is where it all starts.

We discover what motivates each of us and what we have in common with each other that could prove to be of mutual, commercial benefit to us.

As we get to know each other at deeper levels, we decide whether we are compatible or not, and if we are the right fit for each other.  We then set out on a journey of discovering business motivations, capabilities and opportunities that, when utilized in the right way, will reap rewards for each of us and provide a better solution for our customers.

When we begin working with others, creating relationships based in trust is an essential element, both personally and in our organisation.

By shining a light on our relationships with each other and then managing the issues that arise for us – talking them over openly, and having whatever conversations we must at critical points along the way, we will make the most of the opportunities that collaborative thinking and practice have to offer.

Once we have established healthy, trusting relationships with each other, they will begin to impact our own lives and organisations in very positive, practical way.

Of course, this is not to say that these relationships will be easy or that there will not be difficult obstacles that must be addressed and overcome, but these types of relationships will ultimately drive us to improve and performance and results.

According to Helen Wachtel, a well-known family therapist, the definition of a dysfunctional family is:

“A family with more than one person in it”

This sentiment is no less true when we are trying to build complex business arrangements with others, whether they be some form of loose affiliation or a full-on joint venture. Teaming arrangements between companies are not for the faint-hearted!

Therefore, to minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities, we need to ensure that we structure the trust that we have established with each other in the right way.

Personal relationships of trust must be underpinned by all the agreements we make with each other and must be spelled out clearly and explicitly.

We need to take ourselves through a systematic and disciplined, integrated series of processes that will facilitate the building of trust and will enable us to choose a business structure that best supports that trust.

Learn more about our Organisational Development consulting services here.

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Many of these relationships are corrupted by power and self-interest. The issue we face is to do with broken systems and biased supply chains, where costs are going up and income is going down. This is caused by increasing energy costs, an aging population, the inability to obtain skilled labour, the cost of land, natural disasters, and attracting investment partners.

Conducting business as usual is not tenable.

To this end, it is critical that everyone in your business knows its business model, lives its values by the way they behave, and has the business structure and systems in place to explain to others both inside and outside the company its purpose.

It is imperative to understand and manage ourselves and our businesses as part of a much larger set of systems that we can avoid, discover, and enhance. Understanding and managing everything that is being done in the business through this lens and its value propositions is critical for the current business and its ongoing development.

This also includes having metrics and measuring the non-tangible benefits that the company is accruing and providing into its own business ecosystem through the various projects that it is delivering on. In navigating unknown and uncertain environments, we need to find new sources of energy, human capital, financial capital, and land capital to realise new forms of value.

There are many options to be created and explored all grounded in, and directed by, mission, vision, and values. All vision making for instance must be an outside-in exercise rather than purely an inside-out one. In this way, many more options are generated, and more streams of new value realisation are accomplished. Vision-making becomes both a top-down one of intent and an emergent one of achieving results in initiatives and projects with selected strategic partners.

We do this by engaging with the connections that we trust in the system of which we are a part.

We build trusting relationships and partnerships that are defined by preferred attachment, and mutual benefit, and that address adjacent concerns, and possibilities, and create opportunities for both parties. These arrangements are articulated in a Terms of Agreement.

1. We institutionalise the business model and its approach throughout the organisation and those of our partners.
2. We educate and learn constantly about how things can be done better.
3. We produce products and services together for all concerned.
4. We engage research institutes and universities to understand and critique our approach.
5. We always are analysing our business cases thoroughly.
6. We are always evaluating our progress through our initiatives and the positive network effects that they are producing as well as the negative network effects that they are incurring so that we can adjust our courses of action.

This evaluation occurs through the stories being told, the case studies generated, articles in the media, newsletters, our website, and other social media outlets.

The relentless pursuit of all these efforts combined has a compounding effect on your organisation.

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Using technology to connect people for events, conferences and work meetings over the last 2 years of COVID has helped bridge the isolation gap and allow big gatherings to occur on a virtual platform.

Thousands of events are hosted online each day and work just as well as a full-contact event. The good thing about webinars is they can be held anywhere, any place and any time. They save on venue hire and travel expenses and can be much more inclusive just by the nature of online hosting.

Businesses can use technology to hold staff meetings and training sessions for remote staff. Community groups can use online hosting platforms to connect people and service providers. Arts organisations can host ticketed virtual events or promote artists and galleries within the tourism industry.

5 tips to make your online event successful

1. Choose a digital hosting platform that is secure and with an easy to navigate dashboard for you and your participants.
2. You and your participants will need a computer, tablet or mobile phone with a good internet connection.
3. Check your microphone and webcam are working and advise your audience to make sure their devices have a working camera and microphone.
4. Familiarise yourself with the interactive tools you need as support material. These include desktop sharing, slides, graphs, tables and all other visual material that will guide your audience through your presentation.
5. All participants, including you, will need a quiet place where there will be no disruptions and external noise.

Plan and schedule your webinar/event

You have your topic for the event and the time you wish to take to present and follow up with questions and answers. The good thing about online live events is that your audience can communicate with each other or ask you questions and contribute in real-time via a chatbot.

To schedule your event, you need to create the event in the dashboard of your app or hosting platform. Set it for the date, time and duration you require. You can also tailor your event to appeal to your audience and include support material to inform them of the topics for discussion.

Tips for Hosting an Online Events

To build your participant list you will need to email them a link to your event. At the start of your webinar is important to:

1. begin your event with introductions
2. give an overview of the planned schedule
3. define the topic of discussion.

Once you have the introductions and overviews out of the way, then you can begin to present your speech. Participants can watch and listen while communicating on the chat forum. You won’t be able to see the participants, but you can hear them and see the questions and discussions in the forum.

It is important that you make time at the end of your presentation for question and answers or input and contributions. If your hosting platform allows for it, you can send attendees a recording or the slide presentation. This helps them catch up on something they may have missed.

At the very end, you can send your participants a survey to gauge their experience with you and where you can improve for future webinars.

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Your strategy needs to be detailed and backed up with clear steps, with defined targets to get the results you want from your website. Your content should characterise your business and how you stand out from your competitors. It will in the end associate you with your customers, connect you with your contemporaries and define you with search engines like Google.

Essentially, having a well thought out content strategy brings together content writing, SEO, keyword research, designing of whitepapers and social media. Your strategy will be three things: content planning, content delivery and content analytics.

Content Audit

If you have an already existing site we provide a content auditing service to tweak your key words and fix existing content to add more meaning to your message. Content heavy websites are not engaging for the time poor browser so the less is more approach works best. We are the experts at pairing down complicated overly text heavy content into simpler, fresher websites that pack a punch with your messaging.

To answer these questions, our content audit will

• Analyse the current websites content. Discover what can be improved, what can be amended and what needs to be removed
• Find out what pages users read thoroughly, and what pages are only glanced over
• Identify those pages where a high proportion of visitors are exiting the site and those that are popular
• Assess what content has been most successful in terms of website traffic, social media engagements
• Assess whether the content is consistent with your brands ‘voice’ and recommend changes that need to be made
• Discover what content could be re-purposed to become more successful
• Remove any duplicate content
• Identify the SEO elements that can be improved on a per page basis
• Assess the website structure and hierarchy of content

Keyword Research

Keyword research is vitally important as it indicates what terms people are typing into Google to find certain services or answers to their problems. This is doubly important if you are in competitive industries or have a new website.

Ensuring we use these terms as often as possible will allow us to move from guesswork to basing the content around what your core audience is searching for and where there is a gap in the market.

• What terms do wholesale clients (and potential clients) search using Google to find products like yours?
• What topics are people search for online but aren’t finding the answers to?
• What are the most engaging topics in your industry over the last 12 -months?

Content Planning

We Push Buttons will assist you to develop a content plan as the first step. Understanding who your target audience is by knowing who your client/customer/end user is will help you target your marketing in the right direction. What demographic do they come from? What are they looking for when they visit your site? Do they use social media?

Your content marketing strategy is your why, who and how. Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help your users in a way no one else can.

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As part ofyour participation in the 2021 Castlemaine Fringe Festival and the Castlemaine State Festival, why not come down and observecelebrated Mural Artist Jack Rowland, live in actionat the We Push Button’s new office in Castlemaine on 27 March?

In conjunction with this year’s Fringe Festival andin keeping with themodus operandi of the We Push Buttons teamwho for the past 15 years have been supporting local artistsand local community publicevents, the We Push Buttons team, in partnership with the Comma Complex owner and developer James Evans, are celebrating their new office by commissioning Castlemaine raised, Melbourne based Artist, Jack Rowland to create one of his iconic murals on the wall of their new office building.  

Jack has designed a unique image for the We Push Buttons wall and he will beundertaking the project over 3 days from 27 March 2021.  The mural can be viewed from the laneway behind the Comma Stage on Forest Street, Castlemaine.  

Jack Rowland’s chromatic and saturated landscape paintings aim to offer alternative perceptions of the natural world. Rowland exhibits nationally and internationally including James Makin Gallery, Anna Pappas Gallery, Linden New Art, Rubicon ARI, Blindside Gallery, Flinders Lane Gallery and Kunstraum Tapir (Berlin).

Moving forward this mural,situated behind the old Comma Building on the corner of Forest and Hargraves Streets, will be seen by any passers-by on Forest Street who care to look up.

We Push Buttons loves being a contributor to the artistic community that is Castlemaine.

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A lot of local councils are taking up building community directories as part of their strategy to strengthen their communities. Some of the existing directories are quite good, comprehensive and easy to navigate and some are visually messy and confusing to use.

An online directory is a convenient place to search for services, and community groups, and most people hop online for quick access to information these days. It makes sense to have a localised directory based on the needs of local citizens.

A good directory is a knowledge hub that builds connections between residents, community groups and services within a region. It empowers community engagement and charts community assets and resources in an online noticeboard that is of benefit to everyone.

What makes a good community directory?

Start with an engaging home page with a short introductory paragraph about the directory and the community it serves.

It should provide free public access to collated quality information, listing all services and community groups in a one-stop shop, preferably with consistent and attractive page layouts. Quality images are a bonus. If the budget is there then there is scope to develop a whole new branding package that considers logo, colour palette, typography, graphics and social media images. Choosing colours and images that are immediately relatable to local residents will be more encouraging and recognisable.

Your directory should build on the most basic functions for a simple user experience with a straightforward easy to navigate interface, accommodating all community members, even those with limited internet experience. It needs a simple, readable and obvious search and filter bar at the top of the site so users can search by category, organisation or keyword to find everything from small volunteer groups to large service organisations. There should be links to useful services per category.

For listings, you need a simple membership form to sign up online at the front end of the directory. Members should be able to submit their information for free and easily manage their profile via their login details. The membership form should provide fields that list name, and contact details including address, opening times, listing category and a brief description with links to the website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

Each entry needs a small introductory profile, who they service, the areas they service, whether there is disability access and a list of keywords. You could get fancy by having an ‘add to favourites’ button so users can bookmark their most accessed services.

Maximum usability

To maximise usability, email addresses can be rendered as a hyperlink that will generate a new email message for enquiries. Phone numbers can also be rendered to facilitate a click-to-call on mobile devices and websites can be hyperlinked to open in a new window in the browser. Address information can be rendered as a map and/or as a hyperlink that would allow the address to be viewed in Google Maps (preferably in an external window in the browser).

Scalability

Directories are built to grow and therefore are scalable, expanding with new listings and information as needed. It should be able to be done in-house by admin staff rather than outsourced to expensive web developers who charge by the hour to do minor updates.

SEO

A good SEO strategy will strengthen your directory, keeping up to date with keyword research and ranking high with search engines. This will increase traffic to the directory thus contributing to the connectivity of your community.

Calendar

A centralised calendar of events can be incorporated into the directory so members can enter events, course dates, council meetings and announcements, and the public can stay informed of happenings with increased participation rates.

We Push Buttons Community Directory Design

We Push Buttons have had the opportunity to build a wonderful community directory, Connect Mount Alexander. Mount Alexander Shire council approached us to build theirs. The Shire wanted a directory that was a convenient place for its residents to connect with local services and resources. They wanted this directory to be a central knowledge hub that empowers residents to make connections and improve the livability of the region.

Our design included a whole new branding package that included customised graphics and images of the Mount Alexander area. The branding package was accompanied by a style manual of the design work so the council can keep their branding and look consistent for future web design.

Our aim was to make everything on the community directory Home page obvious and readable. A simple, clear filter bar on the Home page allows users to search by category, organisation or keyword. Members can update their profiles and submit content that is visible to the public. Memberships also include links to social media.

Email addresses and phone numbers are rendered to facilitate touch-to-call on mobiles and email messages on all devices. Address information is rendered as a pin on Google Maps in a sidebar widget. Everyone has access to the community directory calendar and community members get regular email updates of what’s on in the shire.

The best thing is that it is simple to use for the public and needs little management input from admin staff.

The second best thing is it connects the community.

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Many people with vision impairment or users who suffer from screen fatigue use a computer screen reader. A screen reader is essentially a synthesized voice-over that reads words displayed on the screen. It will not only read the text, but also the alt-text, link text, menus and call-to-action buttons.

Content management systems for an accessible website

Choosing a content management system that has the tools to build an accessible website is the first step in this process. WordPress and Drupal have templates and layouts that are accessible and plugins and widgets that fit into an accessibility model.

Content structure

When we read a web page or browse information on the screen, we follow the information and absorb it much more easily with a heading structure that makes sense and guides us through the content. It helps to organise the content and highlight key messaging.

Headings should have a cascading structure to help the screen reader follow the information correctly and present it to the user. <H1> should be the top tier title of your page, then <H2> should be the next title in the content structure and so on with <H3> and <H4> etc.

Images

Alt text is very important here. The media file should have a descriptive alt-text that helps the user understand the context of the image. The alt-text is especially important to help the visually impaired understand the context of the image appropriately.

Alt-text is important when infographics are included in the content of your web page. If an image is used as a link, then alt-text should be used instead of the file name.

Colour

Colour blindness which is known as Colour Vision Deficiently affects 8% of the population so it makes sense to cater to this condition when designing your website. Red and green are the most common deficient colours. Using these colours excessively can hinder 8% of people from reading your website properly and links will be lost to them if coloured in this way.

Colours can be designed to distinguish sections of information and organise key messages on the web page. Combining colour with visual signals such as icons also benefits people with learning difficulties to organise web page content into manageable chunks for themselves.

Using white space and a visually logical design layout makes your web page user-friendly to everyone.

Links

For accessible website design, it helps if your links are made up of descriptive text indicating where the link is going. Providing good sentence structure with descriptive link text will make more sense to the person using a screen reader. Instead of saying, “follow the link for a list of our products” it is better to say “For a list of our products follow the link.” That way the screen reader will convey the link description to the user, it will make more sense.

Online forms

Online forms are tricky to get right for accessibility standards to be met. Form structure needs to be consistent, so choosing one method of field selection is important. There are a few methods to choose from. We are all familiar with drop-down menus and checkboxes.

Forms need to be in a logical sequence and the types of information fields need to be grouped together. A tab system should follow the logical order of a form so the user can land on the fields they need to fill in.

Required fields usually have an indicator for the user with good vision. A symbol is also useful for people with learning disabilities or people who speak and read limited English. An asterisk is a commonly used symbol.

A required field can be coded to alert a screen reader to convey this to the visually impaired. Error alerts are important too. The user can be redirected back to the required fields with coding to complete all required fields.

Spam prevention

For accessible website design, there are spam preventions for form submissions that are more accessible than CAPTCHA. WebAIM has some information on web-accessible spam-free forms.

Accessibility for keyboard users

Some people can only use a keyboard due to disability or injury. Your website needs to follow a logical layout for tab and arrow key navigation as the mouse is not an option for some people. To assist non-mouse users to access menus and page content without having to tab and arrow key their way through the whole page, it makes sense to provide jump links. This way browsers can get to sections of the page and skip over parts that aren’t of interest.

A jump link would be something like “Back to the top of the page” or have a jump link list to each chapter or section of a page. This is especially evident in government web pages and pdf documents with long pages of content.

Video content

If you have video content, it’s imperative to include closed captioning and transcriptions to meet accessibility standards. You want to make sure that your website, including sound and video can be accessed and controlled from the keyboard.

Assistive technology and access for all

It is important to set up your website to be compatible with assistive technologies. You want to enable the whole population to have access to your website, your marketing campaigns and your business. Everyone benefits when all visitors to your site can navigate freely around your web pages and feel included in the messaging you are disseminating. In essence, you will gain more traffic to your site and repeat visits from people from all walks of life. That’s a win for all.

We Push Buttons Web Accessibility Standards Service

We design websites in WordPress that are accessible to people of all abilities. We develop inclusive content that meets the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) accessibility guidelines for persons with a hearing disability, learning disabilities, physical impairment, speech difficulties, ageing and visual impairment.

If you need an accessible website developed visit our Custom Web Design and Development service page.

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