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Enhancing School Website Navigation and Design [Pre-Recorded Webinar]

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This short webinar takes a look at how to improve the navigation and design of your school website. We cover topics such as creating a clear, logical hierarchy within your Site Navigation and Section Menus, as well as overall best practices that will make it easy for your school community to find the content on your site. By the end of this webinar, you will have the tools and knowledge you need to be a Site Navigation master!

Show Transcript

all right everybody we are ready to get started thank you so much for coming to today's webinar what are we will be highlighting School website navigation and design we're going to be discussing just why your website navigation is so critical to the success of School site and some ways that we can help improve yours now the inspiration for this webinar came from a recent co-marketing study we saw that said that 37% of website visitors will leave a website if they deem it to have pork navigation and design that's almost one-third of your web traffic right away it's so critical to keep a special eye on your site navigation and let's look at today's agenda that will start things off by looking at the end Prince of website navigation helping users find the information if they are looking for will dive more into that I best practices what you should keep in mind when you are creating your site navigation I work at implementing effective where start navigation right so we're going to look at a cluttered site navigation how we can clean it up right. Even to a real-life site and the CMS with that so we can clean it up together all right and lastly we're going to look at the site navigation and how it relates to section menus and your page management will look at how and why the organization of your pages within the Ali ocms matters and how to best use suction menus there further enhance how your community interacts with your site right now let's look at the central Inn of the date that is why is psych navigation so important website navigation is key to helping people find what they're looking for on your site well-designed navigation system makes you that easy to use and navigate which can lead to more people engaging with your car becoming more invested in your community right this is where you are connecting with your school Community the easier it is for them the more buying you're going to get from them if I'm a parent and I want more info about one of my kids teacher I don't want click through Page after page just to find the staff directory whatever information I need to find I want to get there within two or three clicks right I told 1.4 your SEO your search engine optimization well-designed navigation custom can help improve your website SEO search engines typically use navigation and used to crawl and index website so a well-structured navigation system could potentially help your website rank higher in those search results wickiup Hill if you're looking to boost enrollment the more visible you are in search engine it's the more potential interest that you could gain in your school. The reason why that site navigation is so important all right now best practices right so the first one is I want you to consider who your audience is do you want to get into the mindset of a parent of a school Community member when then you know when your building at your navigation think like they would think like why am I here why what am I looking for all right and from there we want to use clear and concise label your navigation labels should be very clear very concise right use plain language that users can understand I think it a lot do we have a tendency to use I kind of Flowery language or even just like internal Department names right that we will I use you know when we're working but you know to to our our community might not make a whole lot of sense for the right outside of the educational space so we'll talk about this more in detail later but we want to use it very clear very concise labels here are some tips when we're making those clear and concise navigation we want to use a very short words Shore freezes if we need to hang with the flowery language we want to avoid jargon and Technical terms and we really want to use consistent capitalization and punctuation that is keep the next up keep it simple Simplicity is your friend don't overload your navigation with too many options too many choices can be overwhelming and make it difficult for users to find what they are looking for and this is where is Section menus are going to come into play later on and we look at the cmsd this can help you reduce the number of clicks it takes a user to work through your site and lastly think about your mobile audience your mobile users write more and more people are using their mobile devices to access your site aside from having your very own school app with edlio access which we do offer we want to ensure your website navigation is mobile-friendly so users can easily navigate your site on the phone to tablet you can easily do that with the options we discussed above especially especially with the clear and concise labels are want to keep those nice and short and sweet and now we're going to look at implementing effective website navigation in an actual Atley ocms on an actual live site right now so we can kind of work list together I swap over there now all right now we are here on the edlio College Prep School site now up here we have all of our site navigation containers alright and within those we have our legs this one pretty unwieldy right now or I if I'm a parent here I'm not really sure where I'm clicking for some information and I will go through each site have can a container here I'll tell you why or why not I think they are good which ones we can keep and which ones we should be getting rid of an editing all right now I'm one of the first things you should have your he's an about sighting of container is 0.2 lb of college prep school here we have an about sign a container that is good that was in that you want to include information about the school the mission statement of History staff directory things like that right now we have a good amount of stuff right here cleaning up a lot of this the hopping over here to school it is important to have a schools outside navigation to painter if you are a district right so if you're a district and you want to make sure that your users are going to the right place to find their individual school on your District site here that is key in need have it the right I was just having individual links to each School named we weren't we just want to have this school named there nothing else we don't want to include any sort of unnecessary your information they're just leaned to the school and then from their parents and get 20 from the need to once they reach the individual School site are coming over here activities activities a little further down the line but it is good to have an activity set navigation to Tina right this should contain information about like school's extracurricular activities I think clubs organization events cool place things like that very important to have that there now I'm wearing so we are listen here I'm seeing that we don't have an Athletics so I can have container all right so cuz I see what's in here we have some sports football basketball but I think that kind of Warrant its own so navigation container I know you know Adam going through these really kind keep in mind every schools different every district is there for the needs of all the schools are different I'm just kind of going through some basic ones that we see you know on those defective navigation that we come across American tailors to the individual schools that we're working with here who isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all solution but for what we need right now it's kind of going to help generate some ideas for all of you out there are these the ones I think would make the most sense right here right now so I'm going to have a Nexus and Athletics signup container again you do was go through the school's athletic programs team schedules results things like that then next up over here we have a parent sign of contain this is good right you know we can include some resources specifically for parents Wheels have this over here for staff you know that's like a little unclear to write am I coming here clicking on a staff directory to meet this out as a parent or just like that container specifically for staff right for any resources that they might need it's a little unclear right so we might want to come a condensed that what I'm thinking is we combine the parents that we clue. One thing that computer call the resources right and then within that resource is taking a casino down here will have you no parents here and a snack item here so I'm here two pages within of the CMS which we'll get to in a second. I think it was kind of like make the overall site navigation little cleaner and easier for people to find what they are looking for all right so covid-19 are we saw a lot of school what does your 2020 and Beyond you know you do a site navigation container for that is great I think right now we probably don't need a site navigation container specifically for that so I'm probably going to remove that one now this next program here you seem like a very specific program within the school whether you know it's like an Honor Society thing or something like that I don't think it needs its own sign out container right with you probably put that either in the about significant dinner or what are they going to be adding here is an active pemex saynab container I probably can be adding that second right are we going to include information about to get on your squat academic programs a curriculum course is faculty things like that so I think we'll probably go to remove this next program sign a container as well last year we have contact another should be used by you know to bring people to a page with you no addresses phone numbers email address as you know we have our own contact us feature this year with an edlio I do makes it easy for parents to reach out so we're going to keep that they're obviously we'll go ahead and clean up a lot of this here I now let's go in and show how we can actually get to cleaning some of this up all right now I'm here in the admin site for edlio college now to get to our site navigational computer to the hamburger drop-down menu go to site management site navigation okay now here we can see all of our site navigation containers write about schools activities right where we saw the all of those at the top up here before right about school activities now it's come back over here and we can see all of the items we have here under each site nav container I know there's saw some important things to note here before we get started right so I know we talked about the number of saying that container that we have here now you want to go ahead and edit the name of any of these sites that considers you can do that here don't do the three dots at that link and this is where you can edit the name of that site nap container one important thing to note though is if you want add or absolutely remove one of these sighting at containers you're going to have to reach out to either your client success Specialist or our tech support team and recommend going through your client success specialist I cuz they can get it done for you really quickly begin that's only if you want to completely add or remove one if we just want to rename it we can do that right here right this about cuz I think that's the most important sign of container you can have here all right we'll keep coming down here all right we won't for academics schools remember I said the school is a good one to have if you are a district with a number of numerous cool sites but in this case this is just a prep school so we can go ahead will rename this one academics will include links here to all of our departments English science things like that are so academics will come down here all right next up we have a activities that's good so make sure to keep that I like activities so next down here to our next 12 parents or items on my shoes going to rename this one to Athletics if we don't have an Athletics like that container here all right and then this one I'm going to Simply retitle to resources all right I don't know I'm going to have resources that are for for parents a separate part 4 teachers Force students to resources that you know anybody in your school community of your break them down by group what they'll need I think it's a lot easier if we haven't broken up like that all right now this covid-19 one right here I'm going to go ahead and get the removed again you want to have you want to remove one that you go through your CSS hit me with his next program program here I'm going to have that one removed as well they're really simplify our site navigation again giving our school community members you know if your options are at the top it will make things a lot less overwhelming for them I done here I'm going to keep this contact sign a container for now and then after I go ahead and remove these two here I'll show you how we can go in and remove I rename move around some of these eyesight novelinks down here all right the first thing I want to do is going to be in click save all right I will be right back I'm going to go ahead and remove those two second add containers I just mentioned all right I'll be right back aren't you on the homepage we can already see right we have to less site not containers I think it already looks a lot cleaner right there next time I want to go in here and start cleaning this up I want to drastically reduce the number of options we have to click here cleaner and easier for school community members to find what they need to find myself go back over to the CMS all right now as we work our way through these I'm not going to go through the entire site navigation with you here to be a little tedious on right now audit somebody see if you want them so I wonder about why Eva College Prep I think that's a great place to have a page like that school history also very good bullets and probably don't need it there how to use a school bulletin board I really think our news and announcements feature is really the way to go there or news alerts things like that to remove this one from our side navigation that one thing I am deleting this I am just leaving this from of these navigation here right so any page that you have if you don't like the way here you're not deleting that page from the page management you were only removing this site navigation item from Allison navigation here I see that page will still live on on your page management okay let's see recp Homecoming school store I think we don't need that under about all right so you kind of get what I'm doing here all right I know you moved down here to academics know what I really want to do here is just put in each department within our school right so we can remove classes could we have to Fine Arts their Publications we can write that document all right we have these removed classes / assignments I think they'll be better suited as we kind of move into the pages I'll try to look at next I think I'll be better you have that within a section menu instead of right here on our main site navigation to remove this one but we will see something like it later all right when delete that all right I'm going to pick a new item here for some pages alright have a few different options if you lead to an external page you can do that here if you want to add a PDF right here you can do that as well or if you want to use one of our feature Pages you can do that as well with scroll down here see all of our different Peter Paige options but we're going to go over here to section / page we select select a page is going to show us all of our categories sections and pages are at now will get into why that matters how much are in a picture of what am I doing I'm going to go ahead and add all of our departments here and then once I'm done with that I'll hop back in here with you all right I'll see you in a second right now we are back I went through and I added all of her individual academic departments here to our academics site have container okay now I want to see what it looks like on the front facing site I already went ahead and save it so go to the homepage all right now here we are we a hover over academic we can see how much cleaner and M it already looks all right now album next is our section men he's alright let's say like I am a parent here I'm coming in our I want to learn more about my kiddos English language class right someone to click in his language arts I've been over here on the right we are section many all right now this is a however you want to have this populated is completely up to you what you want to break it down by grade I think that's a great way to do it by subject you know if so we could maybe have a little class as well how does grade level you know I was thinking poetry creative writing journalism things like that you can do that all along the side here I'll show you how we can do that and how this relates to your page management let's go back over to the CMS all right now from here drop down menu go to page management and Pages all right now we are here. Remember page management is your friend especially when it comes to ensuring your content and is nice and organized for your school Community is going to help you I hope your audience as well alright the first we want to understand how page management works right and I'm sure you probably heard this before if you've dealt with any sort of tech support or clients because Patrick we always essentially break down our page Manor like this right breaks down into categories sections and Pages we have our categories here alright then we have our sections and we have our individual Pages alright the one way to think about a quick breakdown right your website is a filing cabinet right these categories here are the filing cabinet drawers all right click on one of these here let's just like opening one of the cab drawers to find the little folders all organized inside these little folders are your section these sections right here to take one of those file folders out you open it up or you click there and we have all of the pages little pieces of paper inside those folders right so we have our categories sections and pages are right very important to understand how those work alright someone go back to work categories here back to I will go in the academics section here now one thing I want to point out this little icon right here to note that these are in our site navigation all right now just because something was added your doesn't mean it's automatic going to show up in this like navigation it has to be added right so just kind of I'm bringing this up because it comes down to how you want to organize your page is right so let's say this State Testing section down here with three pages and then I must say I thought this really belong in our academic section here but I didn't necessarily need to add it to our site navigation right so I think it still works here within the organizational structure of academic but I didn't need it within our academics site navigation drop down there leg of the container and that right there just because mine's added there doesn't means necessary we added 2 years and have a geisha have to go in and out of yourself if you do want to add at you over here to these three little dots out of sight navigation or bring it right over to our side by side navigation feature all right now what I wanted to show you was let's see here for English language arts right so no matter what you add here it is going to show up in the section many right so right here when I open this again we have our section many over here. and that corresponds with what we have in our CMS over here all right so like I was saying before we add a new page let's say we want to have we want to have an individual paid for each grade level right so weak 9th grade English will publish like a new page and I'm a blank page read English and so on and so forth I will publish that okay I'm going to come back over here to the section okay I click on this public link and there we go alright so somebody coming here to your homepage right I want to learn more about my son's 10th grade English language class right okay I'm looking at these options here like see like it makes the most sense right English slang that's what I want who made my hair 10th grade English I have it ready to go no good when you're thinking about your site navigation you want to start big then small right so we want to start brought here with your site navigation containers right and then from there we get a little more nuanced with our site and have items here and then you can get even more nuanced in here when adding specific pages to the specific sections here alright just makes it a really great organize your homepage the site navigation and your pages as well I'm in a really help your school Community navigate your your site in a way that is user-friendly attitude if for them all right and I metal wrap things up for us today I want to thank you all so much for joining us today. If you have any questions about citing a bar going to go looking for some inspiration or additional tips and tricks or if you need to add or remove a setting that container like I was saying before when we get your client success specialist they are always happy to help with that kind of stuff if you're not sure who yours is reach out to client success at edlio., will be happy to point you in the right direction and introduce you to your very own client success specialist every site here come I said it's important to know who that is cuz you know they are an  that they are there to help you succeed just like it says in their job title there again I want to thank you all so much and we hope to see you at the next webinar alright take care

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Enhancing School Website Navigation and Design [Pre-Recorded Webinar]

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