Website design for schools: the platforms own this market, and sometimes they should

The first places belong to platforms built for education, not to design studios. They arrive as a bundle: template, news, calendar, staff directory, parent notifications, hosting, support.

For a school with no technical staff, that bundle is a reasonable answer and we will say so rather than sell against it.

The site lives on their system and leaves with them. Stop paying and there is nothing to move.

It looks like the other schools on the same platform. For a district school that is fine; for a private school competing for enrolment it is a real cost, because the site is part of how parents judge you.

Speed suffers on a phone, and school sites are read on phones in a car park. Photo galleries and calendars on those templates are usually the heaviest thing on the page.

Term dates, the bell schedule and the closure notice have to be findable in one tap, because that is what most visits are for.

Admissions needs its own path with the dates, the documents and the fees, since that is the only page that brings the school money.

Staff need to update news and calendar without calling anybody.

Everything has to work for a parent on an old phone with one bar of signal.

A small state school with a volunteer keeping the site alive should take a platform and spend the money elsewhere.

A built site pays off when enrolment is competitive, when the school wants to look like itself, or when the site has grown into several departments with their own pages. Then ownership, speed and structure matter, and that is what a platform cannot give.