Imagine you're visiting a friend in New Orleans for the first time. You know they have amazing food and want to eat something really special and authentic there. How should decide where to go for dinner?

You saw a billboard for a creole place heading in from the airport, but your friend informs you that the chain is a tourist trap — obviously. Conversely, she's already made a reservation at her favorite restaurant: a little steak house up the street. Now that sounds pretty good — except that you're a vegetarian.

So, how can you get what you want?

You tell your friend that you'd love to go somewhere with good vegetarian options, maybe creole – but most importantly: local and specific to New Orleans — definitely not the tourist trap on the billboard, and not a steakhouse — preferably in a festive atmosphere with outdoor seating. Now your friend has the information to make a great recommendation.

It's a concept that is pretty simple: You're best off when you know what you want, can clearly explain your preferences, and let the expert guide you when it comes to local cuisine. The same is true for your school's website design.

Consider your designer and Project Manager your local experts, steering you away from tourist traps, and getting you right to that hidden creole spot only the locals know. With this in mind, here's how sharing your preferences with our team of experts can help your school make the most of its redesign.

Know Yourself

We're school website experts – but you are still the number one expert about your own school. My most successful clients have started the design process knowing (and pinpointing!) a few key things:

• Their school's differentiators
• Their goals for the redesign
• How heavy of a workload their team can handle
• What unique content they have — such as videos, images, quotes, and stories

When I met with to Latin School of Chicago, they revealed that they not only had some really interesting signature programs, they had also had great images of them — including an image of a student with their hands on fire! This lead to a section on their homepage dedicated to showcasing the breadth of these amazing courses.

Lakeside School made it clear to me that they were interested in using more video in their redesign, and importantly, that they had the equipment, skills, and time to create these short videos for their Student Experience page. Understanding their team's skill level and time commitment allowed me to feel comfortable suggesting this design.

You'll have to visit their Student Experience page to see how I used a hover effect to change each photo into a video!

Be Clear and Explain Why

When sharing your input, both during the initial design survey and in revisions throughout the way - why you want something can be more important than what you want.

For example, "make it purple" leads to one solution, which may or may not work very well within the context of the whole page. In contrast, "we'd like the site to be more colorful because we're trying to break with our super-serious reputation" opens the conversation up and allows your designer to come up with a great solution. Perhaps it does include that purple background you had in mind, but maybe also colorful hoverstates and additional pops of color that hadn't occurred to you.

When I was working with Jackson County School District, rather than telling me how they wanted their offerings displayed, they explained why they wanted to show them: because they had more options than the local charter schools.

Understanding that the quantity of the offerings was important lead to a special, filtered design that showed several at once vs a slideshow of one item at a time.

Let Your Designer Design

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
– Henry Ford

Us designers spend all day looking at websites, thinking about websites, sometimes even dreaming about websites. Because we're so involved in this world, we're able to come up with solutions that you might not have even realized existed.

Working with Lawrence School last year, we had gone through a couple rounds of revisions, but the site design still wasn't coming together quite right. The client let me know that while I had made all of the changes he'd requested, the overall site didn't feel innovative and special the way he'd been hoping it would.

He gave the reigns back to me to start over more or less from scratch. Now that I had a good understanding of what we were going for, I was able to come back with a very different design that we were both much happier with.

In the end, our best partnerships are formed when you share your knowledge of your school and we share our knowledge of school websites; when you focus on the "why" and let us focus on the "how".

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As a Senior Designer at Finalsite, Julianne partners with clients to create beautiful, user-centered websites. She is an avid traveler and spent a year teaching English in Japan — which explains why storytelling vibrancy are at the heart of her work. Julianne invites you to suggest an on-site design session with her – especially if your school is located in Hawaii, Alaska, or anywhere overseas.