Over the last few years, school websites have evolved at a rapid pace, with many public districts transforming the way their sites look and feel to support their critical role in engaging and informing their community members.

Equally as important as being a key source of information, your website is a representation of your district's brand. After all, ninety-four percent of first impressions relate to your site’s web design, and seventy-five percent of your website’s credibility comes from design. So, in short, if your website doesn’t look good, the perception of your district will be the same.

When compiling this list for 2023, it was clear what the best school website designs have in common: They all share features that enhance their functionality and accessibility and personalize the overall user experience, including:

1. Clear Navigation and User-Friendly Design: The website features are easy to navigate with a clear, intuitive layout. They often have a well-organized menu that categorizes information logically, making it straightforward for users to find what they need quickly.
    
2. Up-to-date and Relevant Information: They regularly update content to ensure all information, like news, events, school calendars, contact information, and important announcements, is current and relevant to their audience.
    
3. Responsive Design for Various Devices: These websites are designed to be accessible on various devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers, to ensure a consistent experience across all platforms.
    
4. Accessibility Features: They incorporate accessibility features to assist users. This might include screen reader compatibility, adjustable text sizes, and high-contrast color options.
    
5. Comprehensive Profile About the District: The best sites offer detailed information about the district for prospective students and families, including its history, mission, policies, and administrative details. They often provide profiles of schools within the district, including programs offered, staff information, and demographics about their students and families.
    
6. Resources for Students, Parents, and Staff: They provide a wide range of resources for students, parents, and staff, such as links to upcoming events, customized portals, staff directories, and learning resources.
    
7. Engaging Visual Design: Aesthetically and visually appealing design with engaging visuals, including photos and videos, helps to create a welcoming and engaging online experience.
    
8. Multilingual Support: Many of the best websites offer multilingual support to accommodate growing and diverse communities.

While these district websites come in no particular order if you’re looking for inspiration to create the best websites for your schools, these examples of district sites that went live in 2023 set the bar for website design, functionality, and content.

Virginia Beach City Public Schools

A fully accredited school division with 86 schools and a high-performing, diverse community, VBCPS proudly “charts the course” with its district site that launched this year.

The large, eye-catching imagery in the streamlined navigation makes browsing the district easy. Incorporating the district’s themes, colors, and branding with buttons, images, content blocks, and design elements, VBCPS is an excellent example of how to bring over branding onto individual school sites while still allowing each school its identity and feel.

There are a lot of gems to explore on this site, including,

• A detailed strategic plan page outlining the accomplishments and future goals of the district.
• An animated footer is a special treat for users who make it to the “bottom” of the page — a wonderful silhouette of the Virginia Beach skyline.
• A pop-up window on the left-hand side shares the latest news and social postings from the districts, and a filterable and searchable news section makes finding the latest press releases convenient.

Birmingham Public School District

Birmingham Public Schools (BPS), one of Michigan's leading public school districts, proudly captures the experiences of its 7,500+ students across 15 schools on its new website.

The site highlights the district's core values and priorities, featuring news updates and social media highlights to keep everyone informed. You'll find detailed sections about mentorships, career growth, job openings, and a welcoming onboarding program, all easily accessible from the homepage.

Enrollment is also a major focus of the website. It guides users through the enrollment process, whether they are enrolling a young child, an older student, or participating in the district's lottery system. The comprehensive enrollment section provides clear steps and resources for new families, including easy-to-use forms for scheduling school tours and interactive maps to find school boundaries. This makes joining the Birmingham Public Schools community an easy and welcoming experience for everyone.

A few noteworthy details:

• BPS partnered with Finalsite Advantage to bring its creative vision, branding, and user experience to life, giving the site an edge throughout its design and launch.
• Virtual webmasters assisted with content migration and page buildout — a very helpful resource when you have dozens of sites needing to go live before launch.
• A detailed Bond page outlines the district’s accomplishments and what’s to come next.
• There are many impressive design elements throughout the site, including reusable CTA buttons, custom resource panels, and full-width panels and callouts.

Klein Independent School District

Klein's pride in its communities is clear —a vibrant network of 50 schools proudly serving some 54,000 students. Its new website is equally as joyful and gratifying.

For new families, its newsroom is front and center with updates from departments across the district, and its shared vision is prominent — every student enters with a promise and exits with a purpose. It’s a beautiful, vibrant district site that focuses on its community, its families, and the supporting distinctions that make the district an outstanding experience for families.

Don’t miss:

• News and events from across the district are easily accessible through side panels on the homepage.
• Stories from the alumni and teachers of the #kleinfamily, made possible by Finalsite’s Post module
• A detailed Community page with resources and volunteer opportunities for families and students to get involved.
• Beautiful and consistent branding and navigation across each of its 50 schools.
• Klein’s helpful “Find it Fast” feature, complete with icons, a search bar, and quick links, makes searching fast and easy.

Federal Way School District

Federal Way Public Schools’s new site welcomes families to an excellent user experience filled with lovely imagery, consistent branding, and the vision of a connected community. Special sections for students, families, and staff put helpful resources within a few clicks, while a secondary navigation menu lets users explore the site in detail.

As the most diverse school district in Washington state and the 5th most diverse in the nation, FWSD utilizes automatic translation through Weglot to convert the site into multiple languages with just a click, and considering more than 100 languages are spoken throughout the district, it’s put to good use for sure.

Federal Way also teamed up with Finalsite Advantage for additional support with their launch, and it shows! The content and layout are especially mobile-friendly, with events and announcements, calendars, differentiators, and more stacking well on smartphones and tablets. A series of icons make jumping around the site intuitive and easy for those on the go, too. Wonderful site!

Fort Wayne Community Schools

With 52 schools, 4,000 staff members, and nearly 30,000 students, FWCSD has been a vital part of its city for over 160 years. FWCS’s site design is calm and subtle, with little pops of color, dynamic imagery, and video that bring this site to life.

An active news section, testimonials, calendars, and some impressive fast facts make for a wealth of content underneath the surface, including helpful hubs of information for parents and students, complete with some of the most popular resources.

White Plains Public Schools

As one of the first public school district sites to go live in 2023, White Plains site design combines the best of both worlds — bold imagery and color make content jump off the page and capture the attention of prospective families and staff, while helpful resources are front and center for returning users looking for quick information.

There’s a lot to engage users — a social media integration keeps content fresh with the latest posts feeding directly to its homepage, and distinctions from its community, programs, and families fuel some impressive fast facts about what makes White Plains, White Plains.

If you’re looking for more information, you don’t have to look long — a search bar in the top right crawls keywords, and a jam-packed main menu puts seemingly every page within a click. Lovely site!

Community Consolidated School District 62

District 62’s website is the digital home of approximately 4,300 students from PreK-8th grade in 11 schools and one early learning center in Des Plaines, Illinois.

With a district as busy and lively as CCSD62’s, there’s always a story to share. That’s why its award-winning multi-media platform has so much to cover between social media posts, videos, podcasts, and more — it’s one of the best mobile experiences out there.

Be sure not to miss:

• A detailed history page covering the history of the district’s origins.
• A comprehensive enrollment page for new families.
• A wondering leadership page covering their visions and strategies.
• A streamlined search menu, complete with site searches, a directory search, quick links with icons, and popular pages.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Connor has spent the last decade within the field of marketing and communications, working with independent schools and colleges throughout New England. As Finalsite’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, Connor plans and executes marketing strategies and digital content across the web. A former photojournalist, he has a passion for digital media, storytelling, coffee, and creating content that connects.