If you, like most school leaders, have considered a new website, one of your first thoughts may dart to the price. How much does a new school website cost? Schools budgets are increasingly stretched and priorities are hard to juggle. It’s important to go into a new project with your eyes wide open.

At CODA Education, we appreciate that different schools have different ambitions, goals and budgets. But before we get onto price, we think it’s useful to consider the ‘why’.

Why Enhance Your Website?

Increasing Falling Rolls

One of the schools we now work with came to us with falling rolls. In England, the school funding system is directly related to the number of children going to a school. Therefore when numbers drop, so does the budget. We worked to redesign their website to better promote their exceptional offer and within the next year, their number on roll had increased!

Boosting Parent Engagement

Another school wanted to make their ‘out of school offer’ more accessible because their local community and parents were not as engaged in what the school was offering. Our new website project boosted engagement and the perception of the school as the heart of the community.

Attracting New Staff

A different school found that they were not attracting many candidates to apply for their vacancies. Our website refresh presented the school in a new light – videos of existing staff focussed on the values and sense of community. After a while, you’ve guessed it, the number of candidates expressing an interest zoomed higher.

Maximising Impact: A Strategic Investment

When a leadership team or headteacher changes at the school, it can be a great opportunity to share and engage the school community with a new vision or goal. It’s a visual new chapter and a fresh start. Perhaps it’s hard to place a financial value on this, but none-the-less there is value and there is impact. Is there more impact from a new website, than spending a four figure sum of radio or local newspaper articles describing a change of leadership? Possibly.

A good project manager will tell you that there should be a sound ‘business case’ for the project. This means that we are very clear on the why and what we are aiming to achieve. In this sense, the school that increased their numbers on roll meant that no staff needed to be made redundant, there was more money to invest in curriculum resources and the school community was given a sense of an exciting future. Some would say that the project to invest in a new website represented fantastic value for money.

So with a clear sense of what you are trying to achieve and what value that could bring, we can now think about costs.

How Can We Help?

At CODA Education we provide services and website development for every school and every budget.

Let’s start with our entry level website. You’ll get a fantastic modern design that looks as great on a mobile phone as it does on a laptop screen. Our clever designers will customise the site with your colours and branding. We’ll provide all of the training and resources you need to move your content over so you’ll be updating and improving your site in next to no time. For this type of school website project CODA Education would charge £850 exVAT.

Bespoke Designs for Your Success

Now, let’s come back to value. For some of our very busy clients, they would prefer CODA to complete some of the activities. We often forget that we, ourselves are a cost to the school. When a school team member is working on the new website project, it’s time that can’t be spent elsewhere.

So, for example, we migrate content from your old website to your new website. That should save your office staff around 3 days. We also offer professional photography and project manage this, edit the shots and upload them to your new site. In addition, you may want professional project management, so you are not endlessly chasing actions and people to complete activities according to your time schedules.

At CODA Education, we find that most schools opt for us to:

Complete any data protection or information security questionnaires for you, that relate to the website and are necessary for your procurement process.
Deliver design workshops that mean you’ll be engaged in designing a unique website for your school.
Have a dedicated named member of staff at CODA to contact if you have queries along the way.
Have projects professionally managed.
Engage in face to face, individualised training, so the session is delivered at a pace that is comfortable for you and results in your questions being thoroughly answered.
Manage all of the migration of data from old to new websites without you needing to lift a finger.
Think through the photography schedule with you and take professional video and photos, and edit these before returning them to you.
Deliver a comprehensive 18 page website audit with follow up phone call and support for you to make your website Ofsted compliant.
Manage all of the hosting, security and back up for the remainder of the contract year.
Provide unlimited phone and email support for the remainder of the year – incase you need any help or reminders from your training.For this level of service our websites cost from around £1998 exVAT.

Because we don’t put schools into boxes and we are not forced to sell inflexible pre-made products and services, CODA Education stands by its values and puts your school at the centre.

Talk to us about the parts of our service that you value and those you’d rather do yourself. Let us work with you to create a service that’s wrapped around your needs and offers you tremendous value to achieve your goals and ambitions.

Invest in Success

A website is an investment in your school’s success, and the returns may come sooner than expected. Initiate a conversation with us today to explore how our services can deliver unparalleled value, helping you achieve your goals and ambitions efficiently.