Nowadays schools of all kinds need good and informative websites to be successful. A website is the ultimate communication tool, allowing you to display information for educators, students, parents and supporters in the community. Building a school website with WordPress is one of the most affordable ways to get your school online. WordPress is a powerful system that offers the ability to build a scalable website without necessarily hiring a website developer.
A key benefit of using WordPress is that you are building on a platform Trusted by millions of users. As of 2021, around 40% of the internet will run on WordPress. It’s a no-brainer if you’re on a budget because WordPress is free and one of the most powerful examples of open source. Themes suitable for your school can be found for free and set up in minutes. In addition, you will find many plugins that you can use to extend the functionality of your website, many of which are also free.
Reading: How to create a school website using wordpress
In this tutorial we will show you all the steps you need to create your school’s website , and recommend several plugins that most schools can benefit from.
What makes WordPress the best option?
Whether you are building for an elementary school or starting a website for a college or university, there are many reasons WordPress is the best option.
- WordPress is easy. Although large companies like Home Depot and Reuters rely on WordPress, it is also used by small organizations and individuals due to its simplicity. Because it’s so popular, there are thousands (if not millions) of ready-made templates and themes out there that make it easy to create a professional-looking website.
- You don’t necessarily need to a developer. While hiring a developer can be helpful in the future, the basics that will bring your school online can be done by a novice.
- You can be up and running within minutes. WordPress has a 5-minute install, so getting started is almost effortless. And if you use a managed hosting service, this becomes ten times easier.
Getting Started
First things first, you should choose your domain name and hosting provider. There are many domain registrars and hosts to choose from, and we recommend using Nexcess for both.
Registering a domain name
When choosing a domain name, choose something that represents your institution. Preferably, your domain should be the name of your school; However, you should also keep it short and sweet to make communication easier. If your school name is long, consider shortening your domain to make it more marketable. The domain is also the back end of your email address, making it difficult for users to type something like [email protected] correctly.
There are several domain extension options to choose from, including domains specific to your country (.co, .uk, .co, .au), and even domains that are refer to specific disciplines (.biz, .name). Research your options while you decide which one is best for your school. If you want to use an .edu domain name, you should register it with EduCause, the exclusive registrar for the .edu extension. If you decide to use a public extension, go to Nexcess.com to see what options are available, then register your domain.
Choosing a hosting provider
In order to display the content of your website on the Internet, you need a web hosting service. There are many different hosting providers to choose from, each offering multiple plans with different security, storage, and other features at different prices.
No matter which hosting company you choose, we recommend using a fully managed WordPress host. These come with built-in resources to make WordPress maintenance less overwhelming and time-consuming.
In this tutorial we use Nexcess. However, you can easily follow the same steps with any hosting provider. To get started, just select the plan you want and you’re good to go.
Once you’ve created an account, you can enter your domain name and start compiling your WordPress site.
Install WordPress
Now that your website has a place on the internet, you can install WordPress and make your website dreams come true. To install WordPress, first log into your Nexcess Control Panel. From there, select Create New Website in the top right corner of your screen and fill in the required information. Follow the step-by-step instructions and once the installation is complete, enter your credentials to launch the WordPress dashboard.
Choosing a Theme
Depending on what type of school you run, you probably want to choose a theme that looks clean and professional. There’s plenty to choose from, and for this tutorial we’ve chosen the Kadence theme. Kadence comes with beautiful (and free!) starter templates ready to use as soon as you install it. You can choose from any theme and simply replace the default content with your own to instantly create a professional website.
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To install the theme, go to Appearancepng” alt=”The School Management System Plugin for your school’s WordPress website” />
All of these features come standard with the free version of the plugin. And with the paid Pro version, you can even more unlock more features like support for multiple schools, roles and permissions for different types of users, and library management to issue books to students and create library cards. The Events Calendar is our free flagship product and we can’t deny how useful it can be for your school website. Put simply, Events Calendar allows you to add an events calendar to your school’s website. With a calendar on your website, you can You can students, teachers and parents present all your upcoming events in one place.The calendar offers your users rn a landing page where they can quickly browse everything that’s coming up at your school. And you can choose from several views, e.g. B. List, Day and Month views. Another great aspect of The Events Calen Shown is that users can subscribe to the calendar. Parents can add your school calendar to their personal Google Calendar or iCalendar to keep track of upcoming days off from school. Or students can see when test days are coming up. When you make changes to the calendar on the school’s WordPress site, those changes are automatically reflected in the subscriber’s personal calendar. Pretty cool, right? You can even create custom category calendars for different types of events using event categories. Set up separate categories for each sports team, days off, and PTA meetings. Add links to each of these calendars in your home page drop-down menu to make navigation a breeze. To make things even easier, we will be introducing a new series event type with The Events Calendar 6.0, so stay tuned! You have a learning Management system on your school website can be beneficial in many ways. With the shift to online learning, an LMS like LearnDash adds the ability to place course content on your website. This is great, especially for colleges and universities that want to offer online courses in addition to their regular face-to-face offerings. Features include integrations with other plugins such as Restrict Content Pro so you can keep your course content protected and available only to those enrolled in your course. LearnDash also includes a gradebook, flexible prerequisites, and drip-feed lessons so students only get the lessons they want to learn, rather than giving them all the content at once. LearnDash is the perfect solution for the online learning trend that will continue to grow. Another free plugin offered by the Events Calendar team, Event Tickets is key if you want to sell tickets or add RSVPs to your events at your school Website. You can use event tickets to enable online payments for all your school events. Our e-commerce solution, Tickets Commerce, makes it easy to accept payments for school events through your WordPress site. Create tickets for everything from school plays to sporting events, and even get creative by using event tickets to collect testing fees. Once you’ve received payments, you can view and manage all of your payments directly from the backend of the WordPress site. Track earnings, enroll attendees, and easily refund parents who don’t make it last minute. Suppose you want to allow your school to make certain content available only to certain users. In that case, consider implementing a membership plugin like Restrict Content Pro on your school’s website. Restrict Content Pro allows you to create pages available to your faculty members such as: B. Memos, school calendars and parent-teacher conference dates. You can also direct students to pages that only they can see, such as B. Course materials, grades and other academic information. Parent-only pages may contain testimonials, disciplinary information, or additional confidential information specific to them. Inserting a contact form on your school’s website is a great option to ensure that parents, prospective families, and other inquirers can get in touch with your school.With Contact Form 7, you can create multiple forms and customize those forms with simple markup.You can choose an email address for form submissions to should be sent and add a recaptcha and add spam filters to your form. File under “nice-to-have,” community events give you and your faculty the power to host events from the front end of your add site. You usually add events from the backend as an admin, but adding events from the frontend grants others access to event creation without access to anything else available in the backend. Use the Community Events form to allow department heads to submit events through your website. From there, you can approve, edit, and post these events to your main calendar. The community event form is pre-built so you don’t have to worry about creating it from scratch. You can even give parents access to your community events page so they can submit fundraiser or PTA event ideas. Or use the student form to submit prom theme ideas. As the events are not published immediately, you can review all submissions and choose which ones to publish. Add fundraising features to your WordPress site with GiveWP school added. This plugin makes it easy to kickstart your school’s fundraising efforts and makes the fundraising process super easy. Easily set up donation forms, embed them directly into your event pages, and customize forms to include relevant information and eye-catching photos. No fundraising idea? No problem, GiveWP has plenty of ideas to get your fundraising juices flowing. See also: Get started with WordPress Most People don’t realize that the bulk of the work that goes into building websites is preparing the actual content that will be published on the website. A website is like a restaurant, and the content is the actual food that users are consuming. Even though the code behind the website may be outstanding, a website is of little value to an audience if the quality of the written and visual content is not optimal. We will not cover the content in detail in this tutorial , but we can’t help but emphasize the importance of spending a lot of time preparing the content for your website. A website is all about information, so first decide what exactly you want to share. Grab some good old-fashioned pen and paper or fire up a blank Google Doc to start brainstorming with your team. Start by outlining the pages you need. This in turn becomes the main navigation for your site and guide for the content you need to prepare. An example menu could be: Home About Future students Current Students Sport Contact Login Once you have a With a good idea of With the navigational structure of your site, you can begin the rewarding process of compiling content. The great thing about this process is that it helps you reflect on your organization and uncover gaps that may need to be filled. One idea you might want to consider is to make this a project for your students. It can be a fun learning experience for them to participate in creating the text, collecting photos, adding events to the school calendar, and filming or collecting videos. Learning how to create a website and content are useful skills, and teaching children how to implement a website early will benefit both you and them in the long run! And now the moment you’ve been waiting for is finally here.Armed with your content and your fresh WordPress installation, you can now start inserting your text, images, videos and other elements that make up your website. See also: Animate logo: how to create an interactive logo design inspiration WordPress pages are designed for more static content. For example, staff bios, an About Us page, and a student code of conduct are all great uses for WordPress sites. To add a WordPress page, go to Pages2) The Events Calendar
3) LearnDash
4) Event Tickets
5) Restrict Content Pro
6) Contact Form 7
7) Community Events
8) GiveWP
Preparing the content for your website
Outline your site’s navigation
Gathering the Content
Adding Content for your website
Pages
