The need for every school, college, and university to have a professionally designed website is ever-growing. Even when it comes to educational websites, first impressions count. Since these can often be the primary point of interaction for increasingly tech-savvy students, website experience is more important than ever. Surveys indicate that it can even make or break a prospective student’s consideration of a school!

A well-designed website can help attract more attention to any educational institution, and be an important part of its brand building efforts. Of course, it must also provide all special features and functionality to facilitate the interaction between students, parents, applicants, alumni and donors. There is, additionally, a trend of segmentation of the information to better cater to the needs of different categories of visitors.

Traditionally, educational institutions use three main colors: blue, black and white. The newest trends in educational website design made use of brighter colors like orange, red, or yellow as well, at least in some sections of the website. These are still used scarcely, primarily in order to make certain parts stand out. Bright colors are best suited for kindergartens, art schools, dance academies, and the like.

Content is more important than ever: it has to both engage the visitors, and attract the search engines in order to increase the visibility of the educational institution. The use of “brand stories” – feature articles and news, reflecting the brand promise – is a strong trend amongst educational websites.

Social media activities and video content on one hand, and responsive design elements and optimization for mobile on the other hand, must be part of any website these days. There is a trend of big images everywhere, and educational websites have not stayed immune to that trend neither. When it comes to educational institutions, it seems that they are moving away from standard photo galleries and to a 360 degree view presentation covering the entire infrastructure. The use of interactive elements is also trending.

An educational website must have a strong call-to-action: most likely, the goal of an educational website is for a visitor to visit the institution. That goal must be supported with the ease and intuitiveness of using the website’s navigation and internal search, in order to reduce bounce rates as much as possible. Of course, the exact design and structure of any educational website is determined in the first place by the level of that educational institution and its main purpose.