How state schools can benefit from a WordPress website

For many years now, the state school sector has seen a preference and a tendency towards investing in website agencies or providers, which offer an agency built or proprietary technology.

Whilst they may require a minimal investment to set up and implement, many require an ongoing monthly or yearly commitment in the form of a licence fee.

What it also means is that you are tied into a contract and technology that you are unable to move away from, unless you want to begin the whole process of creating a website again.

We feel that such a model is unethical.

With the abundance of available open-source (open source meaning the source code is freely available) technologies available, we find it difficult as to why a school would opt in to such a framework.

One of those available open-source technologies is WordPress.

WordPress is a powerful technology that is very well suited to the needs of state schools.

This blog post presents just a few reasons as to why it should be your platform of choice for your state school website.

It’s intuitive and easy to use.

The first reason why WordPress is such a great platform for state schools is that it allows you to manage your website without the need for any previous experience or knowledge in website development.

You can pretty much have a WordPress website up and running within a matter of minutes.

Within the majority of our state school clients, the role of website administration tends to fall within the remit of the senior leadership team.

With so many other important responsibilities, many do not have the time to attend a course in coding or a week-long training session on an agency’s own platform.

WordPress offers an extremely easy to use user interface which makes modifying content a simple task.

When we build a WordPress website for a state school client, we add additional layers of code to ensure that each platform is set up specifically for what each school needs to do on a day to day basis.

Whether that is changing the homepage content to promote your open evening or to add in a new section to share information on the opening of your latest new facility.

It offers you a lot of control and flexibility.

Whilst originally designed to help bloggers and online publishers, WordPress is now used within most industries for websites for all different purposes.

From simple content and brochure websites through to complex solutions for global enterprises.

It’s incredibly flexible in that a WordPress website can showcase and promote your school’s story and value proposition to prospective parents and pupils, or offer an eCommerce feature for existing parents to purchase school uniform.

WordPress offers complete control over your website too, which is incredibly handy if you have a lot of contributors to the school website.

By implementing tiered access, you will never have to worry again about the art department getting creative and adjusting the design styling or branding of the homepage.

It’s scalable, effectively future proofing your state school website.

A huge attraction of WordPress is that the technology offers you all the elements required to create a basic state school website in minutes.

With a thriving WordPress community (more on that in a bit!), there are thousands of plugins that can extend the functionality of your website to incorporate specific and complex features.

With many state schools now looking for more specialised functions like staff intranet areas or event booking features for open days, this is incredibly useful.

Be sure to only ever use plugins that have been widely tested and adopted within the community!

If there is a functionality you do desire and there isn’t a recommended plugin, then there are thousands of experts who can create this for you.

As the WordPress framework is modular, you can effectively future proof your website, as plugins can be added and removed as the website evolves over time.

It has a global community.

Another huge draw of the platform is that it is free and open-source, and because of that it has a huge global community behind it.

We have members of the mso team who regularly contribute to the community by helping to make changes to the source files or creating plugins for specific functionalities.

WordPress now powers over 34% of websites on the internet!

Which means that if you ever need external advice or support, you have a huge community of people that can assist you.

Which is a huge advantage in its favour compared to a proprietary or agency built technology.

Lasting thoughts.

With state schools investing more into their website experiences more than ever before, deciding on the right platform is essential for a successful online operation.

Once upon a time, proprietary website technologies or agency-built platforms certainly had their place.

We even had our own agency platform many years ago!

And despite huge investment into it, we realised very quickly that open-source technologies were the future.

And out of all of them, WordPress is best positioned to deliver on your needs for your state school website.