How to Structure Your School’s Web Content?

While working with school’s we noticed something they do that harms their website’s usability. The content is either organized incorrectly or not organized at all.

Tiny part of website administrators use only 2 categories: “Relevant” and “Events”, others don’t organize by category at all. While you have just a few posts it might not be necessary to organize them. But when you create more and more, you need a system, so you and your readers could easily find the information they need.

Why Would You Do This?

Schools that post regularly on their website publish at least 10 posts per month. It’s 100 posts in a year, 200 in two years and so on… So in three years, finding a particular post will be nearly impossible. What will you do, when performance reviews come and an auditor asks about the projects you completed?

Why not prepare in advance by simply organizing your content?

What Do We suggest?

We recommend having a system of categories that you will assign each post to. Also:

• Standardize the names of the categories. Agree with the community and describe each category in writing, so everyone can read it, when they need to.
• Use the categories! Assign each post to a category, don’t leave any uncategorized.
• Don’t “collect” irrelevant posts. If they are no longer needed, delete them.
• Create a system that’s convenient to YOU and stay consistent.

What Categories to Create?

Here is a table of categories available on Cleverphant websites. You can see that some posts are temporarily relevant, you can set a duration date on such posts and delete them after they are no longer relevant. You can adjust this table to your needs, but usually it works very well for educational institutions.

Category	Description	Photos	Relevance
Events	Assign posts about the events or photo galleries from the events to this category.	Cover photo is necessary
Announcements	Assign the information about the upcoming events, laws or rules changes to this category.
We are proud	Assign posts about achievements, diplomas, sports results and so on to this category. Don’t forget to add a photo.
Congratulations	Assign all the special occasion cards to this category (Christmas, Easter, Schools b-day etc.)		Temporarily relevant
Competition	Assign all the rules and conditions of the competition to this category.		Temporarily relevant
Important!	Assign all the really important announcements, when you want to attract attention to this category.		Temporarily relevant
Invitation	Assign all the info about upcoming events, meetings and so on to this category.		Temporarily relevant
News	Assign all the other posts to this category.	Cover photo is necessary
For career	Assign all the info about professional self-education to this category.
Projects	Assign all posts related to projects school is working on to this category.

Every category has a pictogram! Pictograms are used when a post does not have an illustration assigned.

Cleverphant 🐘 Conclusion:

• Create a system that you WANT to follow.
• In the CMS create the categories you need.
• Assign each post to at least one category.
• Enjoy an organized archive.