What does a school or nursery website need?

Two audiences, and they want opposite things

This is the structural problem, and naming it solves most of the design argument.

Prospective parents are evaluating. They arrive from a search or a recommendation, they are comparing two or three schools, and they want: what ages, what curriculum, what does it cost, where is it, what are the hours, is there a bus, when can we visit, how do we apply. They will read a lot if the information is there.

Current parents are looking something up. They want term dates, the announcement about Thursday, the uniform list, the form they were sent and lost, the number for the office. They are on a phone, in a hurry, and they will not read anything.

A site organised entirely around impressing the first group makes the second group's daily task harder, and the second group are the ones who talk to each other at the gate.

Admissions: answer the money question

Fee-charging schools resist publishing fees for the same reasons everyone resists publishing prices, and it costs them more than most.

A parent researching schools is building a shortlist against a budget. A school with no fee information is not evaluated as expensive; it is skipped, because it cannot be placed on the list. You never see that loss.

Publish the fee structure, or at minimum a range and what it includes — and be explicit about the extras, because uncertainty about extras is a bigger deterrent than the fees themselves. Lunches, uniform, trips, transport, registration. A parent who discovers those at the interview stage feels misled even when nothing was hidden.

The enquiry form is the whole admissions funnel

For a school this form matters more than any page on the site, and most schools use a generic contact box.

What it should capture, because it determines whether the follow-up is any good: the child's age or target year, the parent's name and number, when they are looking to start, and how they heard about you. Every one of those changes what the admissions team says back.

Two more things decide whether it works:

Acknowledge immediately. A parent enquiring about their child's education is emotionally invested and slightly anxious. An immediate reply confirming it arrived, with the school's name and branding on it, buys you the day or two you need to answer properly. Silence for 48 hours reads as disorganisation, which is the one thing a school cannot afford to signal.

Say what happens next. "We reply within two working days, then invite you to visit." Removing the uncertainty converts better than anything you could say about your facilities.

What current parents come back for

Build these and the daily friction disappears:

• Term dates and holidays, correct and easy to find. The single most-visited page on most school sites.
• Announcements with dates on them, newest first. A parent needs to know whether the notice about the trip is from this year.
• Letters and forms in one place, so "I did not get the email" stops being a conversation.
• Who to contact for what. Absence, finance, a teacher, the office. One page, real names or at least real roles.
• The calendar. Sports day, parents' evening, the concert.

Almost none of this is design work. All of it is maintenance, which is why it is usually the part that fails.

The language question

For a school serving more than one language community, this is not optional and it is not a translation job.

The site has to work properly in both directions — if one of your languages is Arabic, the layout mirrors rather than the text being poured into a left-to-right design, and a half-done version signals something about the school that no prospectus can undo. The detail is in how do I add Arabic to my website.

More practically: both versions have to change at the same time. A school that updates term dates in English and not in Arabic has told one group of parents they are secondary, in the most concrete way possible.

What this looks like in Helm

Spring of Libya is a school running exactly this shape, so the example is real rather than hypothetical.

Announcements and news are structured content you edit — dated, ordered, and updated by whoever is in the office rather than by a developer. That is the difference between a term-dates page that is right in September and one that is right all year.

The enquiry form captures what admissions actually needs. Whatever fields your school requires — parent name, phone, student age, target year — arrive in a proper inbox in the dashboard with read and spam handling, not only in an email that might be filtered. The parent gets an automatic reply carrying your school's branding: your logo, your colours, your name as the sender, with the wording you chose. Forms come with every subscription rather than as an upsell.

Both languages sit in the same screen. Each piece of text carries its versions together, so the person updating term dates updates all of them in one action. Nothing is machine-translated on your behalf, deliberately — a wrong word in a fee table is worse than an honest gap.

Parents can attach files to a form where it helps — a completed form as a PDF, or a photograph of a document. It is switched on per school rather than by default, which for this setting is the right way round: most enquiry forms should not invite uploads at all. Up to three files a submission, ten megabytes each. Note the format limit before you plan around it — PDF and images only, so a parent returning a word-processor file will need to save it as a PDF first. Files are stored privately and open from your dashboard through a link that expires, never from a public web address.

The short version

Build for both audiences and know which page serves which. Publish fees, or a range and the extras. Make the enquiry form capture what admissions needs and acknowledge it instantly. Then keep term dates, announcements and contacts current — because for current parents the website is judged entirely on whether it is right today.